Pirate's Cove

The members of the Cult of Climastrology just can’t help themselves in getting involved in our business

Solo dining is bad for our mental health—and for the planet

Eating alone, once considered an oddity, has become commonplace for many across the Western world. Fast food chains are promoting eating on the go or “al desko.” Why waste time in your busy day sitting down at a table with others?

Surveys indicate that a third of Britons regularly eat on their own. OpenTable, an online restaurant booking app, found that solo dining in New York increased by 80% between 2014 and 2018. And in Japan, the world capital of solo dining, a trend for “low interaction dining” has taken off. Restaurants are opening which facilitate the ultimate solo dining experience: passing bowls of noodles through black curtains into individual booths.

Is this a worrying trend? We think so. Research is revealing the negative impacts of eating alone, which has been found to be linked to a variety of mental and physical health conditions, from depression and diabetes to high blood pressure. So it’s cheering that hundreds of food sharing initiatives have sprung up around the world which aim to improve food security and sustainability while combating loneliness.

Or, maybe some people prefer to eat alone. At lunch time, just let me read my book.

All this is capitalized upon by the food industry. Solo dining suits commercial interests across the food system, with the rising giants of the food industry keen to communicate a convenience culture around food—eat when you want, wherever you are.

Huh. It’s all a conspiracy from Big Food.

So it is certain that food systems need to be reconfigured to meet many of the UN’s global 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. But achieving these goals will not be easy. People are increasingly disconnected from the food system, with an ever-shrinking number of people implicated in food production. As the then UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, argued back in 2014, one of the greatest challenges to creating a more sustainable and inclusive food system is how to ensure people are able to participate actively in it.

Government is the answer! And we need “food sharing”

The seeds for such a world already exist. Our research into food sharing initiatives over the last four years has demonstrated that reinvigorating opportunities to share food—whether that is eating, growing, or redistributing food together with others—can support greater food democracy as well as sustainability. So how do we get there?

How about you leave everyone alone and mind your own business? If people want to eat alone, let them. We don’t need climate nags to nag and force people to eat socially, grow food together, and more. And be nagged about being climate conscious while we’re eating.

What is certain is food sharing has the potential to really change how we think about the sustainability of our food system and the wellbeing of global populations. Of course, food sharing will not solve all the issues facing our flawed global food system but, at its best, it demonstrates how the food system can and should be designed for people and the planet, rather than just for profit.

This article just keeps going and going.

If such initiatives are to be a force for change, however, their benefits need to be clear. On the policy level, this means they need to be measurable.

Who measures it? Government, of course!

Governments tend to see food only as a commodity. They regulate food activities as if they were either solely commercial businesses or entirely private matters. As a result, the social, environmental, and health benefits that accrue from food sharing that don’t fit neatly in either of these boxes are often missed. The lack of holistic food policy departments, particularly at the local government level, does not help.

There’s way, way more in this screed. These lunatics need to mind their own business. But, they won’t.