I think you have to ask...why do we eat....answer to provide material to be digested to build and repair our physical carcass. Eating is the recycling of physical molecules...dust to dust thing.
It is also easy to see that when you are born, life in imbued into one cell and the cell takes in nutrients from the mother and grows and multiplies, until it is born and then still needs nourishment. When you die, all cells lose the nutrients back to earth except for physical structures, like bones that would decay if left to the right mix of elements. Bones will remain in certain dry environments etc, whereas in bogs or mummification more body elements are stabilized.
Richard, I think when Christ ate, he took covered his spiritual linen with phycial wool and entered the physical realm....It will be no problem to pull subatomic material together from the spiritual. The spiritual can walk through the material and ascend and move in all direction.
He did not eat because he was hungry but as a jester as you mentioned. It is simply one thing that a physical body can do. Since the Word of God is Spirit I would expect that a spiritual body would draw nourishment from the Father through the Son.
The way Jesus used the phrase, eat my body and drink my blood points to this I think. He was talking in spiritual sense but the audience heard the physical.
I think there will be communion of the believers, that is why He drawing all men to Himself.
beloved