Page 112 - Southern Oregon Magazine Winter 2019

chow | local habit

It’s not just about eating together, it’s also about how much time we
spend doing it. How much time you spend doing something is a pretty
good indication of where it falls into your list of priorities.

Time spent eating is one of those metrics where the United States is
“number last.” We spend just over an hour a day eating. This is in con-
trast to more than two hours each for France, Italy, Greece, Spain, and
Denmark (in that order for time spent eating). You have to get down to
14th place Latvia before you’re under an hour and a half a day. We’re
29th. While time spent eating doesn’t necessarily translate into eating
alone, I suspect that less time eating generally means eating solo. Even
if it doesn’t mean eating solo, it still means reducing the amount of
time for connecting with people while eating.

While I am predominantly interested in the psychological effects of
eating alone on interpersonal connectivity, most studies on eating
alone are focused on how it affects health and caloric intake. I suspect
this is because more scientists than philosophers are looking at the pro-
cess of eating. One study showed that if people feel lonely when they
eat, no matter whether they’re eating with others or not, they have a
higher fat-calorie intake per meal. Other studies have linked eating
alone to diabetes, high blood pressure, and depression.

I think some of these studies are of limited interest. For instance,
there’s no way to know if people who are depressed tend to eat alone,
or if people who eat alone become depressed. However, they do show
an interesting view into how we think about eating, based on what they
don’t consider. We almost never study eating from a social standpoint.
With the exception of one that discussed depression, every study deals
with eating alone as a risk factor for physical health problems.

In the modern United States, we tend to treat food as medicine. There
are any number of diets that you can choose from that will cleanse you,
make you lose weight, treat sepsis, or whatever. You can eat for your
blood type, you can go gluten free, low carb, keto, paleo… There’s an
aspect of all of these diets that promise certain health benefits based on
eating in a particular way.

There’s no doubt, either intuitively or scientifically, that eating a
healthier diet makes you a healthier person. But to the point of this dis-
cussion, if eating becomes an act of medication, it changes how we deal
with it and in which psychological spaces we engage with it. Medicine
is not something we typically get together with each other to take.
You offer someone who comes to your house a drink or a snack, not
a Lyrica. When food becomes medicine, it takes up the psychological
space of medicine and general health issues, and how we feel about
ourselves regarding health. It essentially loses the connective bond that
it carried since the beginning of time.

This is an important way that we have changed the focus of eating—we
have made it less about the group and the connection between people,
and more about the individual. We have managed to transform eating
into a personal phenomenon rather than a community one. Makes sci-
entific sense, right? My food intake has no bearing on the health of my
uncle, but if I never eat with my uncle, it may certainly affect the health
of my relationship with him.

110 www.southernoregonmagazine.com | winter 2019