Another scholar's summary of my doctoral thesis

The Johannine scholar Suzanne Webster (Ingesting Jesus: Eating and Drinking in the Gospel of John, 2001) drew upon my thesis a few years before Esther Kobel did, but her reading is much the same:

The most comprehensive study of ingesting language and its symbolic interpretation has been conducted by Horace Jeffery Hodges in a dissertation entitled, "Food as Synecdoche in John's Gospel and Gnostic Texts."[Footnote 111] Hodges compares the synecdochical use of food (i.e., food as being part of and as signifying both the heavenly and earthly realms) in early Jewish and Christian texts, with a focus on the Gospel of John and Gnostic texts. He concludes that the Gnostic understanding of the heaven/earth dualism is quite distinct from that of the Gospel of John. The Gnostic texts represent the world as essentially evil; the dualism is ontological. The Gospel, however, reflects the Jewish ethical notion of a good-creation-gone-bad. By identifying Judaism as the principal source of background for the Gospel of John, Hodges argues that Jesus exists by doing the will of the Father (his "food," see 4:34) until he consumes the vinegar on the cross. The vinegar represents the curse that the world took on with the fall from paradise. In this way, Jesus takes on the curse of the world in order to redeem it.[Footnote 112] The real strength of his study is his thorough investigation into the development of ingesting images throughout various religious traditions. 

[Footnote 111. Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1995. UMI9621181.]

[Footnote 112. Hodges, "Food," xii-xiii.]

(Pages 34-35.)

That's a pretty fair summary.