As far as I was taught in the classes leading up to my communion, there's two aspects to this.

One, Jesus and his disciples were culturally Jewish, and would have been following traditions of the Sabbath dinner (Sabbath being from sunset to sunset), and more specifically on that night, the Seder meal that starts off Passah. The Seder has a number of ritual foods to commemorate the Jews in Egypt, and by declaring wine and bread as new symbolic foodstuff, Jesus was breaking with tradition in a very traditional setting. So in one way, yes, some meals were (and are still) ritually and socially important in Jewish culture.

But additionally, this last supper is what the sacrament of communion is based on. It's actually kind of odd to me that the English term doesn't reflect that fact -- in German the communion is often called Abendmahl, in Norwegian Nattverd, in Swedish Nattvard, in Danish Nadver, which are all antiquated words for evening meal. Communion has evolved a bit over the last two millennia and started out as a less ritual, more sitting-together-and-eating type of affair in which bread and wine were blessed, before that element was taken and incorporated into the Sunday service.

So even if the Last Supper didn't actually happen that way, it makes sense, from a logical standpoint, to incorporate a familiar element into the new religion to ease the transition of new practitioners, and it also makes sense to have a very tangible connection between the originator of said religion and its followers. If most of your community are not very educated, literally ingesting bits of their saviour is a very simple way of showing that connection.

I'm gonna go looking for sources that go beyond my pastor and wikipedia stat, maybe someone else either shows up to corroborate this answer or correct it before I can.