"Eat the food, Enkidu, it is the way one lives.
Drink the beer, as is the custom of the land."
Enkidu ate the food until he was sated,
he drank the beer—seven jugs!—and became expansive and sang with joy!
He was elated and his face glowed. (Old Babylonian Supplement at 2.56)
Eating and drinking are among the most basic things an animal (including a human animal) needs to do in order to survive. And yet, the way humans eat when they are together in society—drinking out of jugs, for example—is completely different from the way animals eat in nature. But the food is different, too: a loaf of bread looks pretty different from grass, even though it comes from a kind grass. Hence Enkidu's confusion when Shamhat takes him to have dinner with the shepherds. That said, he seems to take to these news ways pretty quickly—especially to the beer.
"Enkidu, you who do not know how to live,
I will show you Gilgamesh, a man of extreme feelings (?).
Look at him, gaze at his face—
he is a handsome youth, with freshness(?),
his entire body exudes voluptuousness.
He has mightier strength than you,
without sleeping day or night!" (1.214-220)
Here, we get even more opportunity to figure out what Shamhat thinks life is all about; she even tells us that's what she's talking about, when she tells Enkidu that he "do[es] not know how to live." But does the poem as a whole encourage us to adopt that view? Does it want us to think that life "without sleeping day or night"—what Shamhat tells us Gilgamesh does (or doesn't do)—is really the way to go?