Civility stresses regulation, control, propriety, decorousness and tact.
Most parts of the world, people who come together for meals take food at a table. Thus there is a recognizable form for meals, a common theme, with a universal meaning of its own. In general, table manners don't constrain the immediacy and intimacy of life, but rather help make it possible, by achieving a kind of self-forgetting and loss of attention to others.