[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

AMERICANS ARE ABANDONING THE COMMUNAL MEAL  
[[link removed]]


 

Meagan Day
October 29, 2025
Jacobin magazine
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ 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. _

If bowling alone marks the decline of American mid-century organized
social life, exclusively eating alone hints at something more
foreboding, Nick Lachance / Toronto Star via Getty Images)

 

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
[[link removed]],
largely driven by new technologies that facilitate isolation. In the
post-pandemic years, more Americans are working alone
[[link removed]],
worshipping alone
[[link removed]],
scrolling alone, [[link removed]]
exercising alone
[[link removed]],
and orgasming alone
[[link removed]].
And we’re increasingly eating alone
[[link removed]] too.

Today roughly one in four
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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 ones writes in his book
[[link removed]] _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
[[link removed]],”
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
[[link removed]]
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. He told the BBC
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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.

Meagan Day is an associate editor at Jacobin. She is the coauthor of
Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic
Socialism.

* eating habits
[[link removed]]
* communal dining
[[link removed]]
* social exclusion
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Bluesky [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]