Robin Dunbar says we were built to eat together
When I was fourteen, I visited my uncle and his family in Denmark. Whether we were in Helsingør or Bornholm, one cultural difference genuinely surprised me. At least in 1999, no one ate alone. Every meal was a shared one.
For a kid who was used to skipping breakfast or scarfing a sandwich between classes, this was a revelation.
Nearly thirty years later, I’ve been volunteering for an eating disorder nonprofit, doing what’s called meal support. Over Zoom, we eat with each other. I model healthy eating patterns, we do some basic intuitive eating work, and then we distract each other with pleasant conversation and games.
Most of the participants have restrictive eating disorders. Sometimes eating is physically or psychologically painful for them. These sessions are therapeutic for participants, but what I didn’t expect was how therapeutic they have been for me.
There’s something profoundly meaningful about a shared meal, even if you’re not eating the same thing, even if the table is a laptop screen. It has nothing to do with nutrition labels, yet it’s deeply nourishing in a way that rarely gets attention in our era of protein maxing, fiber maxing, and supplement stacks.
Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar turned his attention to this question in 2017. Using data from a large UK national survey, he found that people who eat socially more often report feeling happier, having more friends they can depend on, and feeling more embedded in their communities.1 He proposed that communal eating may have originally evolved as a bonding mechanism, possibly because eating activates the same endorphin pathways involved in other forms of social bonding. Eating together appears to be something we were, in some sense, built to do.
I knew that facilitating meal support would be helpful for the participants. What I didn’t anticipate was just how much I had been missing communal eating myself, especially during my lonely desk lunches. These Zoom meals remind me of what I first noticed at fourteen in Denmark: that eating together, regardless of what’s on the plate, can be exceptionally nourishing.