Gloria Steinem was, by all accounts, no cook. She would just as soon eat an overripe banana standing at the kitchen sink, or throw a tuna sandwich from a bodega into her purse and be off. It even took a few years for her to realize that the stove in her Upper East Side apartment didn’t work.

“When I first moved to New York, I made a list of things that made me afraid of New Yorkers, and one was they didn’t eat standing up out of the refrigerator,” she told an audience last year in New York City at the Cherry Bombe Jubilee, a conference that celebrates women in the culinary sphere.

But Ms. Steinem, who died Wednesday at age 92, understood the power of gathering around the table, as a place for cementing relationships, sharing ideas and building political power — whether at home or in restaurants, where she famously staged protests in the 1960s to end the exclusion of women.

“She used the idea of dinner to get together people she might otherwise not meet,” said the media producer Amy Richards, her longtime creative partner.

Ms. Steinem regularly hosted events in her Upper East Side apartment, which had three floors. One she reserved as her private quarters, and another served as the setting for her gatherings.

Padma Lakshmi, the chef and television personality, was a close friend who spent time on both of those floors. Each had kitchens, she said, and they were equally barren of anything to eat. “I would have to rummage around for a tea bag,” she said.

Events would rely on takeout or catered platters, but the food was so unremarkable that Ms. Lakshmi can’t remember much about it. There would sometimes be Indian food, she said, with the vegetarian offerings Ms. Steinem developed a taste for during the two years she spent in India after college.

“Eating wasn’t the point,” Ms. Lakshmi said in an interview on Thursday. “She didn’t want her mouth occupied with anything else but words.”

Still, the culture of the table mattered to her. In the 1980s, she and three other women started meeting for dinner at least four times a year, on the solstices and equinoxes. She came to call the group, which included the feminist authors Marilyn French and E.M. Broner, her coven. The dinners lasted for more than 30 years.

Carol Jenkins, the only surviving member, wrote that the first one began at 7 p.m. By 4 the next morning, when they realized they didn’t want the conversation to end, they knew they were on to something. The dinners were a place “to tell each other about the state of our lives and have it reflected back to us.”

Ms. Steinem was a regular at several New York restaurants. Chez Josephine, in the theater district, was a favorite, and she would meet often at Union Square Cafe and at B. Smith, the Midtown restaurant opened by Barbara Elaine Smith, one of the first Black celebrity chefs, who became a friend.

Ms. Steinem understood the political power of food, marching for farmworker rights in the 1960s with Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, and joining members of the National Organization for Women in a 1969 “drink-in” at the Berghoff, one of the last men-only bars in Chicago. That same year, she was among the reporters who showed up at the Oak Room in the Plaza Hotel in New York to cover an “eat-in” to protest the restaurant’s ban on women eating weekday lunch there. The Plaza abandoned the policy several months later.

Ms. Steinem drew a connection among food rituals, body image and the oppression of women, pointing out that in many families, children learn gender hierarchies by seeing who eats first and who gets the largest portions.

But ultimately, she found power and freedom in gathering around the kitchen table, in the break room at work or at the coffee table in her living room. Communal spaces where someone can say anything and feel understood and valued were essential, she said.

“The most important discovery of my life,” she wrote in her 2015 memoir, “My Life on the Road,” “was the portable community of talking circles; groups that gather with all five senses, and allow for consciousness to change.”