Eating Alone: Leaving the Table, Losing Community

Once upon a time, people gathered to eat their meals; they sat around a table facing each other and gave thanks to God for the food which they smelled, touched, and tasted; they looked into the eyes of those images of God sitting around the table with them, and they listened to one another. In stark contrast, people are now prone to eating alone in front of the computer, television set, cell phone, or steering wheel; they frequently forget to give thanks to God for the food which they barely smell, touch, or taste; as they eat, they often stare into a screen and hear sounds filtered through electronic means. Recognizing this revolution in human behavior, physician Leon Kass urges us to recall the communal dining table as the font of civilization, and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple warns that the lack of a dining table desiccates civility in the home and in society. Much has happened to cause people (rich and poor alike) to eat alone, and the consequences, from what the U.S. Surgeon General has dubbed an “epidemic of loneliness,” cannot be bright. Indeed, history testifies that those who seek power can easily control lonely, isolated individuals, but not communally connected groups (people who recognize their dependence upon one another). An intentional return to shared meals may provide a fruitful way to rebind social ties and to relearn that only by receiving wisdom may we flourish together and resist exploitation by false authorities.

In The Hungry Soul, Leon Kass offers a history of the table as the center of communal life. Whether for daily domestic dining or for banquets and larger feasts, the table offers a gathering place where people stop working and sit down, facing one another, making “a commitment to spend some time over one’s meal…a commitment to form and formality.”[1] There is structure to the meal, and the diners converse together, for, as Kass writes, “[w]ithout conversation the belly rules the mouth.”[2] Kass contrasts this commitment to form with its neglect, as when we privately devour food from the fridge, eat on the go, or even snack with friends, trough-style, in front of the television. By contrast, when we sit at table, we face one another, not our food, tacitly recognizing a shared commitment to social forms, which “operate, regulate, and inform our behavior and that signify our peculiarly human way of meeting necessity.”[3]

The dining table’s orderly manners and its face-to-face conversation pass down civilizing knowledge from generation to generation. Kass points to table customs (such as what is eaten, where, when, and with whom) and table manners (such as how to eat and how to listen) as powerful communal forms. Through daily repetition of dining together, people learn about their inherited “sensibilities and attitudes—about life, necessity, violence, dignity, and our human place in the world. Amending slightly Brillat-Savarin’s famous aphorism, ‘Tell me what [and how] you eat: I will tell you what [and who] you are.’... These civilizing customs are tailor made to fit and reveal the human form and to nourish the hungry soul.”[4]

Our society cannot easily withstand those agents who seek to control us unless we turn toward each other once again in attitudes of receptive attention. 

In Exodus, God’s people are instructed to share their meals with their neighbors,[5] and for thousands of years thereafter Jews and Christians have offered prayers and hymns of thanks to God for their food and fellowship. Yet, in eating alone, even the faithful frequently neglect to “say grace” or restrain their appetites. Kass observes that a culture’s received wisdom and basic civility become difficult to maintain when people neglect to dine together:

Modern America’s rising tide of informality has already washed out many long-standing customs—their reasons long before forgotten—that served well to regulate the boundary between public and private; and in many quarters complete shamelessness is treated as proof of genuine liberation from the allegedly arbitrary constraints of manners.... But eating on the street—even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat—displays in fact precisely such a lack of self-control: It betokens enslavement to the belly. Hunger must be sated now; it cannot wait. Though the walking street eater still moves in the direction of his vision, he shows himself as a being led by his appetites.[6]

We must, therefore, remember why manners and customs exist. They promote and protect civilization, showing us a humane way of treating others. Table manners—including listening to one another—are sometimes forgotten even before the table itself is jettisoned. At restaurants, today, groups of people stare at cellphones as they eat. They sit together, yet eat alone, for the presence of digital screens—which are intentionally designed to capture and hold our attention—diminishes our ability to attend to each other. Inevitably, when we stop offering attention to one another, we become lonely. Robin Phillips and Joshua Pauling in Are We All Cyborgs Now? explain, “The erosion of attention can lead to profound loneliness, as we become unable to enjoy the meeting of minds that comes from joint attention sharing, but instead begin relating to people only in slices and disconnected bits.”[7]

A 2023 report from the U.S. Surgeon General confirms the point, noting that 

about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness… Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling—it harms both individual and societal health. It is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. And the harmful consequences of a society that lacks social connection can be felt in our schools, workplaces, and civic organizations, where performance, productivity, and engagement are diminished.[8]

Significantly for our thesis, the Surgeon General recommends the following remedy to combat this epidemic of loneliness and foster good health: “Make time to share a meal. Listen without the distraction of your phone.”[9]

As Kass avers, people gain more than good health by sharing meals. They receive customs and formative knowledge, and, by gathering regularly, they develop strong bonds, whereas those who abandon the constraints of manners or champion the liberation from form may devolve into people like the Cyclopes from Homer’s Odyssey. Kass explains:

The Cyclopes are a lawless, savage, impious, uncivilized race of men who live in caves widely separated from one another, devoid of community or council... “Each one is a law for his own wives and children and cares nothing about the others.”... [T]he Cyclops has a single, round, immobile eye in the midline; he thus lacks a horizon, all depth of perspective, and can see only what is immediately before him, here and now. His one eye, lined up directly over his mouth, seems to serve his mouth (like a telescopic sight for capture) rather than the mind, as a window for the wondering beholding of the articulated world.... His barbaric treatment of strangers is central to his ways, and reveals his defective understanding of, and relation to, the world.[10]

In denying both natural form and natural necessity, the Cyclops stands in the world as a tyrant. Everything in the world is appropriable and appropriate for his voracious, limitless appetites. No natural form or given order elicits his respect or reverence.... Like all tyrants, who make themselves the measure of all things, the Cyclops lives in folly no less than in wickedness, for he lives in contradiction with the truth about himself.[11]

Drawing upon decades of work in mental health, Theodore Dalrymple concurs that antisocial, Cyclops-like behavior follows when the dining table disappears:

About half of British homes no longer have a dining table. People do not eat meals together—they graze, finding what they want in the fridge, and eating in a solitary fashion whenever they feel like it (which is usually often), irrespective of the other people in the household. This means that they never learn that eating is a social activity (many prisoners in the prison in which I worked had never in their lives eaten at a table with another person); they never learn to discipline their conduct; they never learn that the state of their appetite at any given moment should not be the sole consideration in deciding whether to eat or not. In other words, one’s own interior state is all-important in deciding when to eat. And this is the model of all their behavior.... Children grow up now in circumstances in which discipline is merely a matter of imposing the will of one person on another; it is raw power devoid of principle. Lenin’s question—Who, Whom? or who does what to whom—is the whole basis of human relations.[12]

Children who mature without dependence on a true authority (one who helps them to grow and flourish) fail to learn the virtues required for giving and receiving (such as honesty, patience, and generosity), which are the basis for all communal pursuits.[13] With no examples of a fruitful way of being in the world, they become like the Cyclopes, not knowing how to care for and depend upon others. This interdependence must be taught by example and can be done at the dining table, whereas abandoning the civilizing forces that accompany dining together removes our sense of dependence upon one another and isolates us. Such isolation not only leads to loneliness and ill health but also to our society’s susceptibility to totalitarianism. As Hannah Arendt points out, “[T]error can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other... therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about.... The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as with the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought.”[14]

While no tyrannical government forced Americans to cease to dine together (except during the COVID lockdowns), many powerful organizations have lured people away from sharing meals. For decades, movies, television shows, popular songs, and advertisements have told us, “Do your own thing.”[15] Subsequently, many have abandoned communal pursuits for individual pursuits, gaining an illusion of self-sufficiency. To further this illusion, we have acquiesced to the digital-screen revolution, which allows computers and cellphones to mediate our relationships and eliminate our sense of dependence upon the physical presence of others and the physicality of the real world. According to Arendt’s observation, America seems ripe for rule by false authorities (those who subjugate men and repress their growth). Our society cannot easily withstand those agents who seek to control us unless we turn toward each other once again in attitudes of receptive attention.

Receptive attention, in fact, forms the basis for our ability to become educated. John Henry Newman, in his Idea of a University, insists that the conversation and communion among students and teachers can bear more fruit than the lectures. He maintains that a residential college offering shared meals and ample time for conversation, but without any lectures at all, would be more successful in “training, moulding, enlarging the mind” than would a college offering lectures but lacking all personal contact. He suggests that conversation shapes society as it educates: “Turn to improved life, and you find conversation in all its forms the medium of something more than an idle pleasure; indeed, a very active agent in circulating and forming the opinions, tastes, and feelings of a whole people.”[16] Similarly, philosopher R. J. Snell writes, “Instruction is necessary, but not by ideas alone.... We need to dwell differently, and this requires cultural forms and practices, not merely lectures and ideas.”[17] Both Newman and Snell point to the necessity of practicing a physically present and attentive way of being that may be maintained and repeated daily at the table.

Just as we have ceased to dine together, Americans have ceased to pray together, sing together, and converse together. We have forgotten God and our ancestors and their wisdom. We come to know neither each other nor even ourselves, and we are poised to believe a paraphrase of Henry Ford’s dictum: “Reality is bunk. The only reality worth a tinker’s dam is the reality that we make today.”[18] Anthony Esolen diagnoses this anomie as a disease of societal dementia, and he prescribes a remedy:

If a people has no music or poetry to begin with—I do not mean as individuals here, but precisely as a people, a culture—are they already beyond dementia?... How does one treat the dementia of a people who can talk but cannot mean, who can shout but cannot sing?...[19]

[W]e must take up the slow and necessary work... of reclamation, of recollection... to give back to our fellows something of their and our lost humanity... [L]et us, one by one, household by household, congregation by congregation, learn to hear and to sing again.[20]

Each day, the dining table offers us an ideal place to listen and sing, beginning with giving thanks to God through hymns in gratitude for the meal set before us and the people sitting in front of us. Unlike the Cyclopes, who neither seek nor know how to live in communion with each other, we learn the truth about ourselves at the dining table through example, conversation, and the customs in which we participate. Indeed, the truth that we learn at the dining table can set us free from tyrants, civilize us, and liberate us from loneliness.