What You Miss if You Never Eat Alone

A bowl of miso soup I prepared for a solo lunch. Lausanne, Switzerland. October 16, 2023.

I often see advice from “experts” telling us all never to eat alone. This advice often comes in the context of insisting on the importance of family dinners—which makes me wonder what they expect of people who do not have partners or children or both—though not exclusively.

More often than not, the never-eat-solo advice comes from the notion that eating alone is psychologically harmful to the individual and center-destroying for a person’s relationships and their overall community. Further, many of these experts explain that people who eat alone tend to have unhealthy diets and habits, from eating standing up or opting for fast food or cheap take out or delivery.

And I can understand all of that.

Eating alone at all times? Not a good idea.

Doing anything in life always alone can’t result in good mental health. And eating alone when it comes to holidays and occasions could prove especially unhealthy if it leads a person to feeling lonely, not simply being alone.

Likewise, if a person allows eating alone to tempt them into consistently bad dietary habits—“consistently” as in not sometimes, as a treat or convenience (which we all do as well in company, after all), but as in “regularly” to “always,” meaning that a person only eats junk food from the carton over the sink—also isn’t good. Undoubtedly not for physical health and, as physical health also includes the brain, likely not for mental health, either.

All this conceded, though, I rather like eating solo on a regular-day basis.

Sure, I love dinners in people’s homes and holiday dinners with friends and family. The community, the conversation, the overall warmth and conviviality—a dinner party is truly something special.

However, I find eating alone relaxing and mentally and physically centering. I can prepare a meal solely to my own tastes and interests in that moment. I can eat when I am hungry, even if that isn’t considered a “normal” hour for a meal by anyone else. I can sit down with a plate prepared to my liking, enjoy my food, pause in my consumption to gaze out the kitchen window, think, and quite often relax into a book.

Even in restaurants at whatever level of formality, I don’t at all mind eating alone. I can go to whatever restaurant I like, order whatever number of courses I want, stay as long or as short a time as suits me, and people watch or read while savoring a meal someone has taken the trouble to conceive and prepare for me.

And while I’ve had people tell me they could maybe eat alone at a counter-service or quick-meal place, they could never do it at an elegant restaurant, I beg these people to reconsider.

While on travel, my husband and I will sometimes treat ourselves to a very elegant, gastronomic, multicourse meal—Michelin-starred restaurants, even—and I have regularly noted people dining solo at one of the tables in the dining room, breathing in and savoring the food and the atmosphere and the moment. I have huge admiration and appreciation for these people.

While I’ve never thought to eat in a Michelin-starred restaurant alone, mainly as it’s only a vacation sort of treat for me, I can absolutely see the value. I always could, but I had the value brought very much to the forefront of my attention during a dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris with a tight dining room. A couple celebrating a milestone birthday sat alongside my husband and I, who’d chosen the restaurant to celebrate our wedding anniversary. Our dining-table neighbors chatted to us the entire meal. While I enjoyed them immensely as a couple, the requirements of volleying conversation with strangers got in the way of the level of attention to the food and presentation and service I like to have on these special occasions.

In fact, I can see how the distraction of conversation and general ongoing interaction would in general turn a person’s attention away from the food. Consuming food and drink mindlessly has its own health risks. When we don’t pay attention to what we eat, we not only miss the flavors and smells, we also miss signals for fullness. After all, while we’ve all heard the guidance to eat more often than not in community, we’ve also all heard the guidance to eat “mindfully.”

And I struggle to see how eating more often than not in company, rather than alone, could possibly mesh well with mindful eating. Not if you want to be fully present and engaged for your companions.

Perhaps my comfort with dining solo stems from years spent happily single combined with years spent working from home. By default, given my situation, I enjoyed many meals independently prepared and consumed. Perhaps as well all these years spent happily eating alone mean that even once we married, I had no problem quickly shucking the notion that my husband and I always needed to eat the same meals for dinner and weekends and at the same times. Sure, we’ll occasionally eat together, but we quite often eat separately and solo.

Attentively warding off any tendencies toward creeping bad eating habits and keeping an eye out for “alone” turning into “lonely” mean, in my thinking, that eating alone has far greater benefits than it does risks.

Feeling guilty for eating alone doesn’t seem particularly healthy, either. (I’m looking at you, guilt-inducing “always eat in company” gurus.)