Eating alone has become a defining feature of modern life: the breakfasting commuter; the household members with conflicting schedules; the widower who receives few visitors. Almost a third of British adults are eating alone “most or all of the time”, according to the latest Wellbeing Index, compiled with data from more than 8,000 people for Sainsbury’s by Oxford Economics and the National Centre for Social Research. Similarly, a Mintel survey of 2,000 UK consumers aged 16 and over has found that one in three are “regularly eating every meal alone”. In London, the figure rises to almost half.
Much of this solitary munching takes place behind closed doors. Single-occupancy homes are the second-most-common household size in Britain and a record 35% of over-16s are single, according to the Office for National Statistics. This is why, in 2018, Tesco announced plans to stock more than 400 single-portion products including burgers, steaks and vegetables.
As a nation, we have also become less self-conscious about solo dining. The bookings website OpenTable recently reported that reservations for one have increased across the UK by 160% since 2014. Bar seating and communal tables are increasingly popping up in restaurants.
While destigmatising solo dining in all its manifestations is liberating, our new dietary habits steer us into uncharted territory. Until now, eating in groups has been a universal human ritual. Not only is it practical (many hands make light work – and also reduce our vulnerability to predators) but meals have, traditionally, been used to meet our fundamental need for connection with others. It wouldn’t be making a giant leap to link eating alone with the current loneliness epidemic. One might also wonder if it is only a coincidence that this new phase is happening at the same time as rising obesity rates.
On a micro level, deciding what to have for dinner after a long day can be a challenge. “Eating alone has not only hugely changed how and what we eat but also how we talk to ourselves about eating,” says Bee Wilson, the author of The Way We Eat Now. “There’s a constant mismatch between a sense of how we should be eating and how we’re actually eating.” The multi-generational family meals of the Dolmio television ads are presented as the ideal, she says, but how many of us eat like that in real life, except for at Christmas? The default number that cookbook recipes serve is still four or six, but at least recipe writers have had to meet demand for meals you can throw together in minutes. Many of us are time-poor now, but when you are cooking for one you have to do the washing up as well. (...)
Increasingly, ready meals are aimed at single households but, “as with any form of eating, there’s probably huge diversity in the ways people eat when they’re alone,” says Wilson. One way that younger generations are “squaring the circle of eating alone, enjoying food but not being enslaved to the kitchen is through the rise of meal prepping”, she says. Meal prep does not simply mean “preparing meals”. Rather it is a hashtag for an Instagram craze (10m posts and counting) for a borderline neurotically health-conscious version of batch cooking. “That has been a huge phenomenon,” says Wilson. “So many young millennials I speak to are going on about that book The Green Roasting Tin – you throw lots of delicious vegetables and herbs into a roasting tray, cook up a huge batch of it, then portion it up into tupperware boxes.” (...)
There is another factor that plays into the rise of solo dining. “In this world of convenience,” says Edward Bergen, global food and drink analyst at Mintel, “what we find is that mealtimes are becoming quicker. In Britain especially, consumers are spending less and less time, year on year, on meals.” In fact, he says, we are a nation of snackers, with 37% of us eating snacks instead of having a proper meal at least once a week. Millennials are the biggest snackers, taking shorter lunch breaks and relying instead on grab-and-go offerings (a booming market), from stodgy pastry products to porridge pots and healthy vegan wraps.
The glory of solitary eating is that you are free to savour your guilty pleasure without judgment. The New Yorker writer Rachel Syme recently triggered a mammoth confessional Twitter thread by admitting that when working from home alone she enjoys “a pickled beet in between a mini Babybel cheese sliced in half, eaten like a tiny sandwich”. Respondents shared their love of everything from tuna salad mixed with a packet of crisps to sucking bacon grease out of kitchen roll.
As the food and hospitality industries compete to service lone diners, the trend is increasingly presented as an aspirational consumer choice. Bergen says: “Of the people who often eat meals on their own, two thirds say mealtimes are a great way to have quality time to yourself.” In these busy times with blurred boundaries between work and leisure, me-time is certainly at a premium. However, as the 2017/18 Waitrose Food and Drink Report found, rather than luxuriate in our own company and take a moment to watch the world go by, many of us (23% of the 2,000 people surveyed) commune with our smartphones when eating out.
The rise of “food television” disturbingly encapsulates this disconnect. Otherwise known by its original South Korean name of mukbang, the phenomenon has become a source of fascination for Wilson. “People are watching videos of other people eating while they’re eating something completely unrelated,” she says. “It has also taken off in the US and people do it in the UK, too.” Usually, the presenters are beautiful young women who webcast themselves eating improbable quantities of food while inanely chatting about how delicious it is. “It’s about being kept company in some way we crave,” says Wilson, “and it’s a vicarious thing where you’re looking at someone eating this 6,000-calorie meal and that makes you feel better about the takeaway pizza that you’re eating by yourself at home.”
by Amy Fleming, The Guardian | Read more:
Much of this solitary munching takes place behind closed doors. Single-occupancy homes are the second-most-common household size in Britain and a record 35% of over-16s are single, according to the Office for National Statistics. This is why, in 2018, Tesco announced plans to stock more than 400 single-portion products including burgers, steaks and vegetables.
As a nation, we have also become less self-conscious about solo dining. The bookings website OpenTable recently reported that reservations for one have increased across the UK by 160% since 2014. Bar seating and communal tables are increasingly popping up in restaurants.While destigmatising solo dining in all its manifestations is liberating, our new dietary habits steer us into uncharted territory. Until now, eating in groups has been a universal human ritual. Not only is it practical (many hands make light work – and also reduce our vulnerability to predators) but meals have, traditionally, been used to meet our fundamental need for connection with others. It wouldn’t be making a giant leap to link eating alone with the current loneliness epidemic. One might also wonder if it is only a coincidence that this new phase is happening at the same time as rising obesity rates.
On a micro level, deciding what to have for dinner after a long day can be a challenge. “Eating alone has not only hugely changed how and what we eat but also how we talk to ourselves about eating,” says Bee Wilson, the author of The Way We Eat Now. “There’s a constant mismatch between a sense of how we should be eating and how we’re actually eating.” The multi-generational family meals of the Dolmio television ads are presented as the ideal, she says, but how many of us eat like that in real life, except for at Christmas? The default number that cookbook recipes serve is still four or six, but at least recipe writers have had to meet demand for meals you can throw together in minutes. Many of us are time-poor now, but when you are cooking for one you have to do the washing up as well. (...)
Increasingly, ready meals are aimed at single households but, “as with any form of eating, there’s probably huge diversity in the ways people eat when they’re alone,” says Wilson. One way that younger generations are “squaring the circle of eating alone, enjoying food but not being enslaved to the kitchen is through the rise of meal prepping”, she says. Meal prep does not simply mean “preparing meals”. Rather it is a hashtag for an Instagram craze (10m posts and counting) for a borderline neurotically health-conscious version of batch cooking. “That has been a huge phenomenon,” says Wilson. “So many young millennials I speak to are going on about that book The Green Roasting Tin – you throw lots of delicious vegetables and herbs into a roasting tray, cook up a huge batch of it, then portion it up into tupperware boxes.” (...)
There is another factor that plays into the rise of solo dining. “In this world of convenience,” says Edward Bergen, global food and drink analyst at Mintel, “what we find is that mealtimes are becoming quicker. In Britain especially, consumers are spending less and less time, year on year, on meals.” In fact, he says, we are a nation of snackers, with 37% of us eating snacks instead of having a proper meal at least once a week. Millennials are the biggest snackers, taking shorter lunch breaks and relying instead on grab-and-go offerings (a booming market), from stodgy pastry products to porridge pots and healthy vegan wraps.
The glory of solitary eating is that you are free to savour your guilty pleasure without judgment. The New Yorker writer Rachel Syme recently triggered a mammoth confessional Twitter thread by admitting that when working from home alone she enjoys “a pickled beet in between a mini Babybel cheese sliced in half, eaten like a tiny sandwich”. Respondents shared their love of everything from tuna salad mixed with a packet of crisps to sucking bacon grease out of kitchen roll.
As the food and hospitality industries compete to service lone diners, the trend is increasingly presented as an aspirational consumer choice. Bergen says: “Of the people who often eat meals on their own, two thirds say mealtimes are a great way to have quality time to yourself.” In these busy times with blurred boundaries between work and leisure, me-time is certainly at a premium. However, as the 2017/18 Waitrose Food and Drink Report found, rather than luxuriate in our own company and take a moment to watch the world go by, many of us (23% of the 2,000 people surveyed) commune with our smartphones when eating out.
The rise of “food television” disturbingly encapsulates this disconnect. Otherwise known by its original South Korean name of mukbang, the phenomenon has become a source of fascination for Wilson. “People are watching videos of other people eating while they’re eating something completely unrelated,” she says. “It has also taken off in the US and people do it in the UK, too.” Usually, the presenters are beautiful young women who webcast themselves eating improbable quantities of food while inanely chatting about how delicious it is. “It’s about being kept company in some way we crave,” says Wilson, “and it’s a vicarious thing where you’re looking at someone eating this 6,000-calorie meal and that makes you feel better about the takeaway pizza that you’re eating by yourself at home.”
by Amy Fleming, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Steve West/Getty Images
