Eating alone is bad for our mental healthand the planet – Quartz

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 Yorkincreased 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 ofmentalandphysicalhealth conditions, from depression and diabetes to high blood pressure. So its cheering thathundreds of food sharing initiativeshave sprung up around the world which aim to improve food security and sustainability while combating loneliness.

Theres LondonsCasserole Club, for example, whose volunteers share extra portions of home-cooked food with people in their area who arent always able to cook for themselves. Or South AfricasFood 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 asMichael Pollan argue that it is due to the general undervaluing of home-based labor, 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 inconsistentworking patternsamong agrowing proportionof the population also discourage meals eaten communally. And an increasing number of peoplelive alone, which certainly does not help. Reports ofincreasing feelings of lonelinessare widespread.

The variety of peoples social circles is also decreasing. Declines involunteering,political participation(beyond voting), fewer people givingto charity, and less time spentinformally socializingare all symptoms of this.

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 foodeat when you want, wherever you are.

This should be no surprise. Asnew 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 benecessary, viewing the increase in food production and distribution that they have generated as a prerequisite for global food security. Many othersus includedpoint out that this production-focused approach has led to negative effects on peoples 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 monocultureshuge swathes of a single crop grown over enormous areasare heavily dependent on synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and antibiotics.

These in turnlead to biodiversity loss, environmental pollution, and increasing fossil fuel dependencysynthetic fertilizers often require significant fossil fuel inputs (primarily natural gas). Around a thirdof food produced is lost or wasted across the system and yet still billions of people globally go hungry everyday.

So it is certain that food systems need to be reconfigured to meet many of the UNs global 2030Sustainable 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,arguedback 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 developedthree scenariosfor sustainable food systems: technological, community-based, and educated.

The technological scenario puts smart eating at its center. 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 individualized 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 foodwith others.

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 foodwhether that is eating, growing, or redistributing food together with otherscan support greater food democracy as well as sustainability. So how do we get there?

People often blame modern technologiessmartphones, apps, web platforms, and the likefor disconnecting us from each otherand 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 worldat the expenseof those next to us on the bus or in a restaurant.

But the internet also provides many opportunities toreconnect over food. Whether it is identifying opportunities to grow together viainteractive mapsof community gardens, or discovering the location ofsocial dining experiences in your neighborhood,thousands of grassroots and community-led initiatives use food as the catalyst to bring people and communities together. These initiatives are often local, small-scale, and volunteer run, but their online presence means we were able to locate them in all four corners of the world.

We systematically mapped these food sharing initiatives in100 cities developing an online interactive tool to explore why, what, and how food is shared. We prepared detailed sharing profiles for cities includingDublin, Berlin, London, Melbourne, and Singapore. This wasno easy processgiven the diversity of people and places covered, but it gives important visibility to activities that easily fall below the radar of politicians and the media.

We found that different sharing initiatives occur at all stages of the food chain, from growing food, to preparing and eating it, to distribution of waste.

There are thousands of food sharing initiatives that focus on providing opportunities to grow food together. These often build on a long cultural tradition of food cultivation that is evolving and embracing new technologies to facilitate shared growing activities.

Such initiatives are immensely valuable. Growing with and alongside others provides a way to combat loneliness and opportunities to spend time in nature without spending money. It also provides a range of health and well-being benefits, reducing stress, heart rate, and blood pressure. Recent researchhas uncovered that spending only two hours in nature each week can have the same health benefits as five portions of fruit and vegetables a day or 150 minutes of exercise.

Reuters/Alessandro Garofalo

Despite this, urban green spaces are becoming increasinglyrareand food growing initiatives often operate under threat ofevictionon temporary meanwhile leases. Governments should therefore look to shared growing initiatives for inspiration when considering future policies.

Himmelbeet, for example, is an intercultural community garden in the district of Wedding in Berlin. Thegoals of the initiative are to enable access to healthy food and education, providing the good life for all. Founded in 2013, it is currently located on vacant space in one of Berlins most disadvantaged neighborhoods. The initiative offers opportunities to grow food as well as providing cooking workshops, a monthly open-air movie screening, repair cafes, swap shops, and much more.

Everything in the garden is developed in a collaborative manner with many volunteers working together to facilitate learning and give room for friendships to develop. One of Himmelbeets current projects is the development of a book on gardening that is accessible to everyone, with a diverse group working together to develop the content to ensure it meets this goal. Himmelbeet promotes its shared growing activities viasocial mediaand actively campaign for more transparent land use planning in the city.

We identified many community gardens which use technology as a tool to organize and spread their shared growing activities. Out of 3,800 initiatives in the database, around a quarter involve shared growing, although their distribution varies from city to city. Our research suggests permanent growing gardens across the city should be developed as a form of social and environmental prescription. This is not hard to dolocal governments protect parks all the timebut it requires officials to recognize the value of growing together.

Technology is also being harnessed to enable eating food more communally, acting as an antidote to the industry-encouraged trend towards solo eating on the go. This new wave of food sharing start ups are a range of peer-to-peer dining applications and platforms that offer food experiences to those who want to share their passion for cooking and eating. These food sharing experiences often build on local food flavors, secret recipes, and eating within the intimate space of a strangers homeranging from supper clubs to cooking classes to ad hoc soup kitchens.

InSingapore, sharing food has always been part of community, providing a sense of rhythm, friendship, and social belonging. Eating is commonly agreed to be a national passion. Often described as a food paradise, the citys food landscape is shaped by diverse culinary practices and cuisines, including Chinese, Eurasian, Indian, Malay, and Peranakan traditions. Such dishes can be found within hawker centersbasically down-to-earth food courts offering diverse and reasonably priced foodacross the city-state.

But many traditional hawker fares such asloh kai yik(stewed chicken wings) are becoming increasingly hard to find in the hawker centres. Food is a form of living culture, continuously evolving with the passing of skills and traditions from one generation to the next. Despite this, many Singaporeans feel that today, food is being influenced by fast food cooking styles and consumption of convenience food, weakening hawker traditions.

So, while the city-state has nominated hawker centers for UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage to continue the practice of food hawking, it is not so common to come together as strangers and share meals and cultures, something that shaped Singapores gastronomic profile.

But all is not bleak. In response to this trend, an emerging internet-driven food sharing scene in Singapore is now providing other ways to sample, taste, and share traditional Singaporean cooking, such as meeting and dining with home chefs through the Share Food App, a platform for sharing and selling home-cooked food.

One person using the app, Elizabeth, grew up with her grandmother, who used to be a hawker. She remembers her grandmothers ingenious ways of sourcing vegetables from the market, cooking with local ingredients, and preparing traditional recipes. Elizabeth spoke to us about her passion for sharing Nyonya food, which combines Chinese and Malay cuisines, and the experience of dining together provided a unique way to explore the culinary history of Singapore. She told us that food sharing apps such as Share Food have potential to create new food ways that inspire food practices against relentless globalization of tastes.

As this demonstrates, technologically-enabled food sharing is not only a form of environmental and social activism, these digital tools also enable people to come together through food, and salvage dying cultural traditions and stories.

These stories of food sharing barely scratch the surface of thefood sharing activitieswe have tracked that are emerging globally. Some initiatives focus on waste, for example, with large platforms such asOlioandFalling Fruitallowing people to access surplus food, while others such asFoodCloudandFareShare connect smaller organizations with large retailers to reduce food waste. Others, such as EatWith, offer the opportunity to dine with people in their homes, connecting people for more personalized food sharing experiences.

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.

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. And so we have been trying to establish more precisely what kinds of impacts food sharing initiatives are creating. We found that all of the initiatives express either social, economic, or environmental goals, but few conducted any formal reporting of impact. This is not surprising; food sharing initiatives have limited time, money, and skills available to them to take on such additional tasks. They are often battling just to survive.

It is relatively easy to count the amount of food produced, consumed, or shared. Some surplus food redistribution initiatives, such as FoodCloud, are already doing this very effectively. It is much more difficult to establish how shared experiences make a difference to people in terms of their emotional or social needs. Even here we have some useful indicators. The number of meals people share with others can be an indicator ofsocial capitalas seen in thebig lunch project.

We worked with initiatives to co-design the freeSHARE ITonline toolkit to help food sharing initiatives of all kinds to understand and communicate their impacts more clearly. We are providing the resources and online infrastructures, food sharing initiatives just need to find the time to consider the impact they are having on those with whom they share.

Whether food sharing initiatives flourish or fade is not only down to the energies of those who establish and participate in them. Government policies and regulations play an important role in shaping food sharing activities. In anew publication, we document how food sharing initiatives often struggle to gain visibility among policy makers.

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 dont 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.

These arecommon challenges across European, Oceanian, and North American cities attempting to build sustainable urban food policies. But there are reasons to be optimistic. London, for example, has just launched a new food strategythat seeks to increase the visibility of food matters all around the city.

Meanwhile, actions need not always be state-led. Londons Victoria and Albert Museum is currently hostingan exhibition on foodwhich explores how global issues from climate change and sustainability to workers rights interact with the way we produce and consume food. It takes visitors on an experimental journey, including food sharing initiativeswe have examinedsuch asOlioandFalling Fruit, asking: Can what we eat be more sustainable, ethical, and delicious? Slowly, such actions are encouraging more people to think about different ways in which we can produce and can come together around food.

Thinking outside the box around food is crucial given the challenges we now face in relation to global environmental changes. There is general agreement that our food systems need a dramatic overhaul.

It is sometimes hard to keep positive in the face of social, economic, environmental, and political instability. It is then heartening that people are organizing in solidarity with others around the most basic of human needs: food. Acting together in this way has been shown to be an empowering way to deal with issues of eco-anxiety. By their very existence these food sharing initiatives provide a demonstration effect for others. They are, as Jane Riddiford fromGlobal Generation and The Skip Garden and Kitchen initiative puts it, creating the conditions for change.

In many cases, initiatives are acting and organizing themselves in the face of government inaction rather than because of it. Initiatives plug gaps in emergency food provision and provide opportunities for community groups to bring food into their services in ways that would have been impossible otherwise. They provide actual care in the community as vulnerable and marginalized groups are welcomed into community gardens and participate actively in cultivating both food and interpersonal relationships.

Food sharing initiatives are then to be celebrated for their collective actions contributing towards thesustainable development goals, but this is not enough. The way we govern food needs to change. The current agri-food system has been set up to regulate multinational corporations and private consumers, not support digitally-enhanced community groups and entrepreneurial grassroots start ups set on delivering social, economic, and environmental goods and services.

Ultimately, the value of food sharing, and the contribution it makes to the physical and mental wellbeing of individuals, communities, and the planet, needs to be made visible. Our research suggests that we can make our communities more edible and liveable.

Cultivating widespread food sharing takes a lot of time, labor, and care but the social and environmental return on investment is worth it. In these difficult times, cooperation is key to our redemption.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This article is part of Conversation Insights. The Conversations Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. You can read more Insights stories here.

Read this article:

Eating alone is bad for our mental healthand the planet - Quartz