Hi, it's me, Tom. I am now going to  explain how to paraphrase with synonyms. Synonyms are two or more words that mean the same or almost the same, which is why we can use them very well for paraphrasing. Let's say we want to paraphrase the following sentence.

'Our decisions about food are complicated by the fact that we don't eat alone. Table fellowship has forged social bonds [...].' [1]

This means, we would have to find synonyms for:

decisions  / complicated  / by the fact that / alone / table fellowship / forged social bonds

The word  'eat' is so commonplace that it is not necessary to replace it.
   In the past we used to work with big Thesaurus Dictionaries of Synonyms. Today we have websites, e.g. Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, OALD, and even Word for Windows has a synonym function. Using a thesaurus, we would choose the (sometimes preselected) most relevant words, and we would come up with the following synonyms for 'decision':

accord / agreement / arrangement / choice / compromise / determination / finding / judgment / opinion / outcome / preference / resolution / result / ruling / selection / settlement / verdict

Now from these we must select those synonyms that make sense in our context. That can sometimes be difficult because we do not know all the meanings of all the words we find. So we concentrate first on the words we already know or can recognize (because they are from Latin or other languages we know) and on those that we know are too formal or too specific for our context of 'deciding what to eat'. To deal with the remaining words, we have to work with a dictionary. This way we would strike the following words off our list:

accord / agreement / arrangement / compromise / determination / finding / judgment / opinion / outcome / resolution / result / ruling / selection / settlement / verdict

The synonyms left are suitable for replacing 'decision' in the context of 'deciding what to eat':

choice, preference

In case, you do not know the words you find, check them with a reliable dictionary, such as OALD or Merriam Webster and similar professionally produced dictionaries. You can also try to find the words in sentences in academic texts to see if they work (Any search engine will do).

We go on and do the synonym search for: complicated / by the fact that / fellowship. The results would look roughly like this:

complicated: more difficult / arduous / convoluted / fancy / hard / intricate / knotty  / perplexing / problematic / sophisticated / troublesome.

I strike off the list: arduous / convoluted / fancy / hard / intricate / knotty  / perplexing / problematic / sophisticated / troublesome. then I will go on and do the same thing with the other lists of synonyms.

by the fact that: because, because of, due to the fact that, owing to the fact that
not alone: together with others, in a group, in company
fellowship: companionship

I have removed: acquaintance / affability / alliance / amity / camaraderie / club / communion / company / comradeship / conviviality / friendliness / guild / intimacy / kindliness / league / order / society / sodality / togetherness. So, that's it. Now let's use our synonyms as far we have got:

Jonathan Safran Foer (Foer 2009, 149) claims that 'our choices of food are made difficult because we eat together with others. Dinner companionship ... [...].

Figurative expressions: With 'forge social bonds', we have to be careful. This is a figurative expression. It says less than it means. In such a case, we have to interprete what the phrase means or what the image comprises: A bond is something that binds you. A 'social' bond means 'dependent on or influenced by other people'. From this interpretation or description we derive our synonyms that we can use:

Jonathan Safran Foer (Foer 2009, 149) claims that our choices of food are made more difficult because we eat together with others. Dinner companionship influences our choice of food.

eat: If a word is very commonplace and has no true synonym, then you do not need to paraphrase it, e.g. eat.

dinner companion: you have also seen that some synonyms require a certain collocation (a particular accompanying word). If you want to use 'difficult' then you have to use a verb like 'make sth. ~' or 'become ~'. If you want to use 'companion', then you need a partiucular noun, i.e. 'dinner companion'.

Concerning the structure: This paraphrase is quite different from the original sentence, but its structure is still very close to the original. So I would not use it without also changing the sentence structure, but what we can see here is that we can produce a first rough paraphrase just by using synonyms.

If you like, you can do the synonym exercise below.