There is no traditional food society where the custom is to eat alone

Tech to Rebuild a Social Eating Habit

 It took 70 years to undo a Western tradition of social eating

If you look at traditional cultures around the world, it’s almost dizzying how many healthy choices people have on how to live. One traditional food culture eats primarily meat while another is entirely vegetarian. One culture loves to eat food so spicy it would stun the next culture. Some cultures eat insects and the next is grossed out by the same food. The truth is there are a ton of healthy diets and ways of getting excellent nutrition. But there is no traditional food culture where the custom is to grab your bowl of food and retreat to a private space to eat alone. Until now.

Modern Americans have eaten more alone than together for the last several years.  According to industry data we crossed that dubious line in 2014. But it took 70 years of redesigning our food system around convenience, overwork culture, and distracting technologies to get us to stop looking for someone to have lunch with.Today it’s a cultural norm to eat alone, maybe while staring at your phone or doing work at your desk. 

In the American food industry today, convenience is a profitable trend. Billions of dollars have gone into designing and marketing packaged and delivery foods that are meant to be eaten alone. Ironically, many of these foods are even marketed as healthier for you with designations like Organic, Gluten-Free, or Fat-Free making you feel like eating a meal replacement bar on the run is a healthy choice. The true costs of this trend have never been fully reckoned with. Excessive lonely eating wrecks havoc on our bodies and our minds. And lonely eating has gotten excessive for far too many of us.

Social isolation has negative health effects equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes per day.

It can harm our sleep and cause stress. It’s been shown to augment both depression and anxiety. It can also lead to flight-or-flight stress responses. 

Studies have shown that coming together can alleviate feelings of isolation and loneliness. Eating together is an especially effective way of alleviating social isolation. Studies have also shown that those who eat socially are more likely to feel good about themselves. Meals taken in a spirit of celebration and mutual enjoyment, like with birthday cakes, are even more likely to create feelings of closeness. 

Your brain confuses hunger and loneliness. Neurologically they light up the brain exactly the same

Social eating is also intimately involved with portion control and that shows up strongly in the science.

The opposite of a healthy social life can be dangerous to anyone who has ever struggled with portion control. The connection between loneliness and binge eating is well established.

Social distancing, though necessary, created its own crisis because of isolation. Overeating and portion control problems related to loneliness and isolation grew substantially during this pandemic era of enforced social distancing.

Overall, social health influences dietary behavior. By working on our social health with social meals, we can support improved dietary choices.

Social satisfaction leads to a full feeling stomach and a more satisfied baseline mood because loneliness and hunger share the same nerve center in the brain. That means your body can easily confuse your loneliness as hunger even when your stomach is already full. 

Butterflies in the Stomach and Punches in the Gut

Your stomach and your brain are not as separate as you might have learned in school. The stomach is our second major center of information processing with around 500 million neurons. It’s known as the enteric nervous system and it has equivalent intelligence to a dog’s brain. 

You’ve likely felt the enteric nervous system acting up in your belly at times of social stress or crisis. “Butterflies in the stomach” is how people describe that tingling feeling that arises from a fear of public speaking or being the center of attention. “A punch in the gut” is how people often describe a bad humiliation or embarrassment.  The language people choose reflects a common experience of where we feel our social stress in particular.  If you’ve ever felt sick to your stomach about a relationship or what other people are thinking about you, you’ve felt your social stomach. Our social stomachs seem to care deeply about our social health. They don’t let us feel happy when we are socially stressed.

Our social stomachs encourage our happiness when we feel connected and socially at ease. Research suggests that our enteric nervous system is a key player in determining our mood and feeling of well being. That’s why those who eat socially are more likely to feel good about themselves. It also means that by taking care of our social health, we can directly influence and improve our baseline mood.