Science has finally found solid, objective proof of something we’ve all known in our hearts: Sharing food makes us happy! Those who share more meals with others report significantly higher levels of life satisfaction…
Charles Schultz, creator of the legendary Peanuts comic strip, became enshrined in the pantheon of great 20th Century philosophers when he coined the phrase: “Happiness is a warm puppy.”
Eternal verities
That’s become recognised as one of the Western world’s ‘eternal verities’. A fundamental truth of our times and species. Something you don’t dispute or futz around with. It just is.
So, for me – and many other food-attuned folks – has the notion that we all feel better, more positive and more optimistic about life, the universe and everything when we share food with others.
There, waiting for us
It’s like the idea of food being a central focus and tenet of our existence was already waiting there for us when we made the final evolutionary leap from lower primate to being fully human. One of the things that ‘separates us from the beasts’, as 19th Century thinkers used to say.
Though it’s now known that other species also share food and seem to do so as a behaviour that cements family and community ties, not just as a necessity for the whole family or group to survive.
The World Happiness Report
For over a decade, the annual World Happiness Report (WHR) has shown that social connections are important drivers of happiness, both at the individual and national level, and across cultures. It also acknowledges that sharing meals remains an understudies measure of social connections.
The WHR reports, in general, that: “novel data for 142 countries and territories collected by Gallup in 2022 and 2023, WHR researchers have [shown] stark differences in rates of meal sharing around the world. While residents of some countries share almost all of their meals with other people, residents of other countries eat almost all of their meals alone. These differences are not fully explained by differences in income, education, or employment.”
We’ve always known…
One particular observation of the WHR preamble caught my eye – and my imagination…
“The topic of sharing meals has remained relatively understudied in the academic literature,” the WHR report confirms. ” [But]the connection between food and social relationships is far from new.”
“In French, copain (friend) and in Italian compagno (mate) come from the Latin cum+pānis, literally ‘with-bread’,” the authors point out. “The Chinese term for companion/partner, 伙伴, stems from a similar term (火伴) which literally translates to ‘fire mate’, a reference to sharing meals over a campfire…”
What they found
Researchers data-mined a global data trove collected by Gallup from more than 100,000 subjects in 142 countries and territories in 2022 and 2023 that collected information on dining behaviour and satisfaction with life and came to a focused few key findings:
- Sharing meals proves to be an exceptionally strong indicator of subjective wellbeing – on par with income and unemployment. Those who share more meals with others report significantly higher levels of life satisfaction and positive affect, and lower levels of negative affect. This is true across ages, genders, countries, cultures, and regions.
- In 2023, roughly 1 in 4 Americans reported eating all of their meals alone the previous day – an increase of 53 percent since 2003. Dining alone has become more prevalent for every age group, but especially for young people.
- Countries where people share more meals have higher levels of social support and positive reci-procity, and lower levels of loneliness.
- There remain vast gaps in our understanding of the causal dynamics of meal sharing, subjective well being, and social connections.
My take
I was profoundly disappointed to hear that there’s been such an increase in the number of Americans (and, by association, probably all North Americans) who regularly dine alone. That doesn’t bode well for the overall state of American’s life satisfaction, or perceived level of well being.
And that’s particularly unfortunate in this time of high and growing pressure to adapt to a fast-approaching future in which our individual and collective ability to survive will depend more and more on our confidence that our families and communities have our backs.
All of which suggests we all need to be more aware of the value of sharing meals and to work pro-actively on increasing opportunities to do so. Let no holiday or beloved tradition go uncelebrated!
And while you can’t boil it down to as simple and elegant an assertion as, say, “Happiness is a banana split with two spoons,” that sounds like a pretty good start…
~ Maggie J.