Learn English – Use of “to lunch” vs.”for lunch”

The sentence you didn't hear properly is:

Sunday lunch is not simply about refueling but a relaxed communal experience centring on a well cooked meal.

A native speaker would not use centric on instead of centring on in the sentence. Secondly, the words are not synonyms unless they have or are used as the same part of speech.

Centric is an adjective. Centre (US: center) is a verb. It is also a noun. And nouns can be used as adjectives. Rarely, adjectives can be used as nouns (the poor). Therefore, unless the two words are being used as the same part of speech, they are not synonyms.

As a verb center/centre is quite often followed by on. See center on and the example sentences.

Since centre on can be part of a verb + particle combination, the use as a gerund centring on is not surprising.

We use gerunds to modify nouns all the time. You can also use a past particle as an adjective, as in:

Sunday lunch is not simply about refueling but a relaxed communal experience centred on a well cooked meal.

One can use an adjective instead of the gerund (centring) or past particple (centred):

Sunday lunch is not simply about refueling but a relaxed communal experience central to the day.

Central is a much more common adjective than centric. The use of centric to and centric on is hard to find. Central to is the overwhelming usage.

You can find examples of centric on using a google search in goole books, but almost all of them are false positives, such as

Turner mixes basketball and soul music with a James Brown-centric on-air TV campaign to hype the playoffs.

As for more on gerunds, the use of centric as an adjective, and how that is synonymous to the use of -centric, feel free to read the following.

Sitting around the Irving Street kitchen table, they discussed rewriting the winning blueprint they'd devised thirteen years earlier. "Instead of a single recipe," he said, "why don't we do some menus building up to a party?"

Notice the noun menus followed by building up to a party. If one wanted, one could easily use centring on/around a party here.

Why don't we do some menus centring on/around a party?

The next sentence of my source is

Julia loved the idea: a "meal-centric" program for occasions, like birthdays.

Here, the the adjective centric is being used with meal to form the compound adjective meal-centric. A hyphen is often used when two adjectives are used as a compound adjective to desribe a noun, here program. Of course, meal is normally a noun, but like most nouns can be used as an adjective, as in meal ticket.

And this use of centric is synonymous to the suffix -centric, meaning "having a specified centre. A meal-centric program is a program whose specific center is that of a meal.

“at” and “to”

I went on a trip at the zoo.

means that while you were at the zoo, you went on a trip. For example, maybe you took a ride on a little train that travels through the zoo.

I went on a trip to the zoo.

means that the zoo was the destination of your trip. For example, maybe you and other people in your school took a ride on a bus and visited the Columbus Zoo.

Familiar phrases

One of the primary meanings of at is to indicate a location considered indivisible, and one of the primary meanings of to is to indicate the destination of motion. But don't think that these prepositions mean the same thing in every context. Often with English prepositions, you need to understand the phrase as carrying an important part of the meaning, which can't be inferred from the words and grammatical rules alone.

In this sentence:

I went for a coffee at my parents'.

a listener tends to hear coffee at my parents' as a separate, familiar phrase. In this context, coffee means spending some time together drinking coffee and talking. The word at still carries its meaning of indicating a location. The phrase a coffee, which overlaps coffee at my parents, suggests that you drank only one cup of coffee.

This sentence:

I went for a coffee to my parents'.

sounds a little strange, but it's still grammatical. The reason for the strangeness is not a grammatical rule, but the familiarity of the phrase coffee at location. The word coffee is an important part of the familiar phrase, though many kinds of social activities can fit there.

Competition from other familiar phrases

By the way, without the apostrophe, this sentence:

I went for coffee to my parents.

means that you asked your parents for coffee, probably because you had run out of coffee and you couldn't buy coffee for yourself. That is because this sentence doesn't contain the activity at location formula, and it makes a listener recall two other familiar phrase patterns, which interfere with the meaning you intend. One of them is:

I went for help.

This means that you searched for someone to help you, probably traveling away from your current location. The other relevant phrase pattern combines this one with for:

I went to a bank for a loan.

I went for a loan to my parents.

As you can see, in this phrase pattern, the prepositional phrases can be reversed. The went for phrase often suggests seeking help from someone else. In that context, to indicates who you are seeking help from or where you're seeking it.

There is actually no great danger of being misunderstood if you vary a preposition in a familiar phrase. People use context and common sense to infer your meaning. But the above shows the role that that prepositions commonly play in English, which goes beyond their meanings as individual words: they lead a listener to recall one familiar phrase pattern or another, each of which has its own meaning.