Breaking Bread: the Functions of Social Eating

Abstract

Communal eating, whether in feasts or everyday meals with family or friends, is a human universal, yet it has attracted surprisingly little evolutionary attention. I use data from a UK national stratified survey to test the hypothesis that eating with others provides both social and individual benefits. I show that those who eat socially more often feel happier and are more satisfied with life, are more trusting of others, are more engaged with their local communities, and have more friends they can depend on for support. Evening meals that result in respondents feeling closer to those with whom they eat involve more people, more laughter and reminiscing, as well as alcohol. A path analysis suggests that the causal direction runs from eating together to bondedness rather than the other way around. I suggest that social eating may have evolved as a mechanism for facilitating social bonding.

Keywords: Happiness; Social bonding; Social engagement; Support clique; Trust.

Fig. 1

Frequency with which respondents reported having evening meals alone

Fig. 2

Percentage of respondents who had not had a meal in the previous 6 months with different categories of people they know

Fig. 3

Mean (±2SE) number of people at the respondents’ last lunch or dinner

Fig. 4

Distribution of size of support clique for men (grey bars) and women (white bars)

Fig. 5

Mean (±95% CI) number of close friends and family that a respondent could rely on plotted against how often they reported eating their evening meal with other people. X-axis: 0 = never; 1 = rarely; 2 = sometimes; 3 = quite often; 4 = very often

Fig. 6

Mean (95% CI) rating of being engaged with the local community, level of trust in local community, worthwhileness of life, happiness on day before and satisfaction with life, for respondents who always ate their evening meals alone (open symbols) or who at least sometimes ate with others (filled symbols). Ratings are on a 1–10 scale, except Community (1–7)

Fig. 7

Path analysis of the relationship between the main variables in Table 1. All significant partial standardized coefficients are shown. Solid lines: positive coefficients; dashed lines: negative coefficients. Numbers beside the lines are the standardized coefficients. Single headed arrows indicate cases where one coefficient was significant and the reciprocal coefficient not, or where one was at least double the other. Double arrows indicate cases where both coefficients were significant and of similar magnitude; in these cases, the larger of the two coefficients is given

Fig. 8

Mean (±2 SE) rating of how much closer respondents felt to the other people with whom they had an evening meal depending on whether (filled symbols) or not (unfilled symbols) the meal was accompanied by laughter or reminiscences