Breaking Bread: the Functions of Social Eating

Abstract

Communal eating, whether in feasts or everyday meals with family or friends, is a human universal, yet it has attracted surprisingly little evolutionary attention. I use data from a UK national stratified survey to test the hypothesis that eating with others provides both social and individual benefits. I show that those who eat socially more often feel happier and are more satisfied with life, are more trusting of others, are more engaged with their local communities, and have more friends they can depend on for support. Evening meals that result in respondents feeling closer to those with whom they eat involve more people, more laughter and reminiscing, as well as alcohol. A path analysis suggests that the causal direction runs from eating together to bondedness rather than the other way around. I suggest that social eating may have evolved as a mechanism for facilitating social bonding.

Religiosity and religious attendance as factors in wellbeing and social engagement

“…Humans have evolved a number of behavioral mechanisms for maintaining community cohesion in their large social groups. These have included singing (Pearce, Launay, & Dunbar, 2015), dancing (Tarr, Launay, Cohen, & Dunbar, 2015), feasting (Dunbar, 2017;Dunbar et al, 2017) and storytelling (Dunbar et al, 2016). All of these have been shown to increase the sense of bonding to the individuals with whom these activities are done.…”

“…Friendships provide the underpinnings for communities, and this in turn creates the effectiveness with which the community provides key group-level benefits like protection, exchange of favors and other forms of cooperation (Dunbar, 2018). The activities that humans use to create this sense of bonding share an important feature in that they all trigger the brain's endorphin system, the principal bonding mechanism in primates including humans (Dunbar, 2010(Dunbar, , 2017Loseth, Ellingsen, & Leknes, 2014;Machin & Dunbar, 2011). Because it involves opioids, this mechanism creates a sense of belonging, of contentment and relaxation, that has knock-on consequences for our health.…”

“…Because it involves opioids, this mechanism creates a sense of belonging, of contentment and relaxation, that has knock-on consequences for our health. In a pair of studies of the role of feasting (communal eating and the social consumption of alcohol), Dunbar (2017;Dunbar et al 2017) found that eating or drinking socially formed part of a web of causal relationships that included both the number of close friends and key psychological variables such as how happy we feel, how satisfied we are with our lives, how worthwhile we feel life is, how engaged we are with our local community, how much we trust our local community, and how immersed we are in our local community. Many, but not all, of these causal pathways are bidirectional: having more close friends increases our sense of contentment, and the more contented we are the more friends we are likely to have.…”

The phone walkers: a study of human dependence on inactive mobile devices

“…Ap-parent age of individuals was assessed via a set of common visual cues (e.g. see Rhodes (2009)), through observations of height, build, and facial features, following similar practices to Dunbar (2016Dunbar ( , 2017. In particular, the number of individuals determined to be over 65 years accounted for less than 1% of cases and fewer than 2% of cases were determined to be under 21 years, the vast majority of which were infants.…”

More than Just Food: Food Insecurity and Resilient Place Making through Community Self-Organising

“…Research on social networks demonstrates that those who have strong social networks live longer and better lives, even when they are living with ill health [52,53], but as respondents demonstrate engaging in social activities that enable networks to flourish is linked to being able to afford to participate in those activities. Without funds to participate, social networks break down and isolation results.…”