Americans Eat Most of Their Meals Alone

This might be seen as worrisome, or sad. Evidence of a social breakdown. And perhaps it is. Or not.

For starters, what, exactly, is alone, these days? With texts, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter et al, we tend to be online even when we're eating with others. The picture of four people at a table each engrossed in their smartphone, has become so commonplace as to hardly elicit comment anymore.

Time, performance pressure, long commutes, fragmented part-time work and financial uncertainty have all contributed to this trend. And that is probably not healthy. But traditional bonds are fraying: church or synagogue membership is down in western democracies, as is marriage. The number of people living alone is now over 25 percent of the population. And not all are old, infirm or unhappy.

For restaurants and businesses that prepare foods ready to heat and serve, this is an unalloyed benefit. For society, it may be evidence of a broader malaise - or of a growing self-confidence. JL

Quentin Fottrell reports in MarketWatch:

People are marrying later in life and starting families later in life. And the high number of hours worked by Americans and the fact that commutes are getting longer every year.
It may have taken more than half a century, but Miss Lonelyhearts from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” finally has some company. Americans eat most of their meals alone, new research finds, with families finding it more difficult to find time to eat together and a dramatic increase in the number of single-person households.
The majority of meals (57%) are eaten by solo diners, market researcher NPD Group found. Snacks have the highest percentage of lone diners (72%) followed by breakfast (61%) and lunch (55%). (Solo lunches include workers eating at their desk.) Although 34% of Americans spent dinner time alone, half of American families still choose to eat dinner with each other five times a week. Would this make Ward Cleaver proud — or not? “A generation ago, the ‘Leave it to Beaver’ television family ate dinner together,” says Warren Solochek, vice-president of client development for NPD’s food service practice. “Today, that traditional eating arrangement is much harder to achieve.” Although this was the first time NPD carried out the survey, experts say the trend of a person cooking for just themselves or requesting tables for one will continue.
Single-person households jumped from 17% in 2008 to 27% in 2012, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. “People are marrying later in life and starting families later in life,” says Andy Brennan, a lead analyst at research firm IBISWorld. “A lot of restaurants are accommodating single diners with more bar space. There isn’t the stigma there once was to dining alone.”
And eating takeout meals is easier, he adds, because of the growth of free apps like GrubHub and Seamless.

Restaurants – still struggling after the Great Recession – are happy to cater to the new wave of single diners. Breakfast menus are the only growth area on fast-food and casual dining menus, studies show. “Breakfast sales rose over 5% to $27.4 billion last year at quick-service and fast-casual restaurants, according to analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data by research firm Mintel. What’s more, fast-casual restaurants were the only segment to see traffic growth in the restaurant industry last year — increasing 7% in 2013 and 9% in 2012 — while other areas remained stagnant, NPD said.
With the popularity of on-demand entertainment via DVRs and mobile devices, it’s no longer easy to blame the fall-off in family dinner time on TV, says Jonathan Wai, a psychologist at the Duke University Talent Identification Program. He sees it as part of a broader unravelling of the “social fabric” and cites the high number of hours worked by Americans and the fact that commutes are getting longer every year. The 40-hour work week in the U.S. is longer than the work week in many European countries. And around 2.2 million U.S. workers have a daily commute of at least an hour to and from work, according to the U.S. Census.
Of course, some people want to be alone. It’s really important to distinguish between happily alone and lonely, says Susan Cain, co-founder of Quiet Revolution, a mission-based company to celebrate introverts, and author of “Quiet: The Power of Introverts.” She says a lot of people look forward to time alone. “There’s a new trend of restaurants, particularly in Europe, that are designed for dining alone,” she says. While some hosts still greet solo diners with the question, “Just one?” there’s been some progress: BBC online recently featured a restaurant in Amsterdam, Eenmaal, which only has tables for one. Cain says that’s why there’s more solo and family dining restaurants. The Le Pain Quotidien restaurant chain has large tables aimed at solo diners. “One of the much unheralded pleasures of café life is the ability to be alone together,” she says.
Last year, 53% of families ate together six to seven times a week and 28% ate together four to five times a week, a recent Gallup poll found, but those figures have remained relatively steady over the last 15 years. And the slow disappearance of family mealtimes means that parents and children are also spending less time together. Indeed, teenagers who have dinner with their parents fewer than three times a week are four times as likely to use tobacco, twice as likely to use alcohol and 1.5 times more likely to use marijuana, according to a 2011 study by The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.