For a sustainable future, we need to reconnect with what we’re eating – and each other
Anna Davies, Trinity College Dublin; Agnese Cretella, Trinity College Dublin; Monika Rut, Trinity College Dublin; Stephen Mackenzie, Trinity College Dublin, and Vivien Franck, Trinity College Dublin
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. Open Table, an online restaurant booking app, found that solo dining in New York increased by 80% between 2014-2018. 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.
There’s London’s Casserole Club, for example, whose volunteers share extra portions of home-cooked food with people in their area who aren’t always able to cook for themselves. Or South Africa’s Food Jams, social gatherings in which participants are paired up, preferably with strangers, and given a portion of the meal to prepare. Such initiatives offer lessons of all kinds to those thinking about how our food systems need to change. This is why we have been researching them, in our several ways, for the last few years.
So why has eating together declined? There are a variety of reasons. Authors such as the food writer Michael Pollan argue that it is due to the general undervaluing of home-based labour, including cooking. The widening of the workforce, which brought many women out of the kitchen and into the workplace during the 20th century, also contributed.
Meanwhile, the growth in insecure and inconsistent working patterns among a growing proportion of the population also discourages meals eaten communally. And an increasing number of people live alone, which certainly does not help. Reports of increasing feelings of loneliness are widespread.
The variety of people’s social circles is also decreasing. Declines in volunteering, political participation (beyond voting), fewer people giving to charity and less time spent informally socialising are all symptoms of this.
All this is capitalised 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.
This article is part of Conversation Insights
The Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.
Food is big business
This should be no surprise. As new research shows, power and control over food globally has become so highly concentrated that large, profit-oriented multinationals are influential in shaping critical decisions about how our food is produced, traded and marketed. Some consider such global agri-food businesses to be necessary, viewing the increase in food production and distribution that they have generated as a prerequisite for global food security. Many others – us included – point out that this production-focused approach has led to negative effects on people’s livelihoods, cultures and environments.
It is undeniable that the global food system that has been created over the past half century is unsustainable. The increasing incidence of monocultures – huge swaths of a single crop grown over enormous areas – are heavily dependent on synthetic fertilisers, pesticides and antibiotics.
These in turn lead to biodiversity loss, environmental pollution and increasing fossil fuel dependency – synthetic fertilisers often require significant fossil fuel inputs (primarily natural gas). Around one-third of food produced is lost or wasted across the system and yet still billions of people globally go hungry every day.
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 involved 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.
But what would a more democratic and sustainable food future look like? By discussing this with a range of stakeholders, we developed three scenarios for sustainable food systems: technological, community-based, and educated.
The technological scenario puts “smart eating” at its centre. Fridges might monitor the food that is contained within them and provide recipes for using food that is close to use-by dates to avoid unnecessary waste. High levels of socio-cultural change, meanwhile, are envisaged under the “community eating” scenario, which champions greater opportunities and spaces for communal lifestyles. In this scenario, grow groups (basically technology-enabled community gardens) become mainstream activities, available to everyone. Meanwhile, the “educated eating” scenario, which puts high levels of regulatory innovation at its core, envisages advances in carbon accounting of food products and individualised carbon credit budgets.
The ideal food system would of course incorporate elements of all three of these visions. But above all – and in all three scenarios – it was stressed that a sustainable food future should be replete with opportunities to share food with others.
Food sharing
The seeds for such a world already exist. Our research into food sharing initiatives over the past 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?
People often blame modern technologies – smartphones, apps, web platforms and the like – for disconnecting us from each other and creating a world in which solo dining becomes commonplace. Smartphones mean we live in an “always on” culture. Fast food of any description is waiting to be delivered straight to our desk, with no need to leave home or the office. Meanwhile, apps allow us to connect seamlessly with people halfway round the world at the expense of those next to us on the bus or in a restaurant.
But the internet also provides many opportunities to
