Consuming food all by oneself is an anomaly in the history of human civilization, a deviation from millennia of tradition. And more and more Americans are doing it.
In 1950, sociologist David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd posited that a strong sense of conformity in America was replacing genuine human connection with a performance of group belonging. Avid consumers of mass culture, we had become primarily motivated by a desire to fit in. By blending into the crowd, he argued, we were all hiding from each other in plain sight.
Fifty years later, that seemed like a quaint problem to have. From churches to clubs to labor unions, as political scientist Robert Putnam argued in his landmark 2000 book, Bowling Alone, our civic infrastructure had disintegrated. The once-conformist crowds had dispersed, leaving behind a social void. Hunger for peer approval may have been misguided, but having no peers was far worse.
Another quarter-century on, atomization has only intensified. American life is suffering a profound social contraction, largely driven by new technologies that facilitate isolation. In the post-pandemic years, more Americans are working alone, worshipping alone, scrolling alone, exercising alone, and orgasming alone. And we're increasingly eating alone too.
Today roughly one in four American adults eats all their daily meals in solitude, a more than 50 percent rise since 2003. For young adults under twenty-five, the increase is even more dramatic, with an 80 percent jump in solo dining over the past two decades. Living on an urban street with a rare surplus of street parking, I have a front-row seat to this dreary spectacle. Come lunch time, diners fresh from the nearby 7-Eleven or McDonald's descend on my block to eat in their cars, patrons of the world's loneliest cafeteria.
If bowling alone marks the decline of American mid-century organized social life, exclusively eating alone hints at something more foreboding. Consuming food all by oneself is an anomaly in the history of human civilization, a deviation from millennia of tradition. Shared meals stretch so far back that the earliest texts of ancient Sumerian feasts suggest their customs had already undergone centuries of evolution. As archaeologist Martin Jones writes in his book Feast: Why Humans Share Food:
A field of cattle will spend much of their waking hours grazing. In doing so, they naturally create a sense of individual space, avoiding eye contact as they proceed in quiet, unending, solitary consumption. That is a commonplace pattern among animal species, and quite distinct from the routinized, ritualized, social meals of our own species. At some stage our ancestors departed from that more commonplace animal behaviour to our unusual pattern of eating together, face to face.
You occasionally hear someone refer to solitary cupboard rummaging and fridge raiding as "grazing," letting slip an awareness that the behavior is more bovine than human. But we know that human meals transcend mere animal sustenance. Across the world and throughout history, we share meals in a routine expression of friendship, cooperation, group belonging, mutual recognition, relaxation, and celebration.
By forfeiting the practice of eating together, we're losing a reliable source of contentment. A study conducted by Robin Dunbar, a biological anthropologist at Oxford University, found a strong link between shared meals and greater overall happiness. The ability to dine with company is naturally correlated with other factors that increase life satisfaction, like having friends and family or leisure time. But Dunbar ran a statistical analysis to demonstrate that sharing meals also just makes us happier all on its own. She told the BBC that eating and socializing both trigger endorphins, and that when we pair the two activities, our endorphins shoot through the roof.
Dunbar's study found that shared meals in which "laughter and reminiscences" were reported were the ones most strongly associated with positive effects. Little wonder: Jones observes that the world's oldest clay human figurines are found among the remains of ancient feast halls, suggesting we learned to tell stories about ourselves in the same places where we converged to share meals. The simultaneous act of eating together and telling stories promotes a feeling of closeness that's impossible to replicate by other means.
Perhaps that explains why we instinctively grasp for it, even in our isolation: while a minority of Americans now make conversation while eating any given meal, the rest mostly report watching television or scrolling social media. On my block at lunch time, drive-in diners stream videos on phones propped awkwardly against the steering wheel. Even when we're eating alone, we fill our senses with human voices, faces, and personalities -- a faint echo of the convivial ancient hearth.