More of us are cooking or eating solo – it’s time to break free from the stigma of dining alone
“We call it a crisis of loneliness. In France, it’s a crisis of manners. In China, it’s a crisis of family,” Dr Mukta Das tells me. “Every nation around the world has this idea that eating together is better, and that eating alone is against the norm.” An anthropologist at Soas University of London, Das is fascinated by the shift of eating from a predominantly communal, convivial activity to something we now frequently experience by ourselves.
There are 8 million single households in the UK and in 2019 the Wellbeing Index revealed almost a third of British adults are eating alone “most or all of the time”. This shift may well have been exacerbated by lockdown, during which those who lived alone necessarily ate alone – but it was in motion long before, says Das, thanks to the “transformation of our family-oriented culture into something more individualistic”.