After my first breakup, I was in pieces. I was inconsolable– not that there was anyone around to console me. I had been inconveniently dumped in the days right before my older brother moved out of the house, my younger brother went off to summer camp, and my parents left for a month-long cross-country road trip. Alone in the house with just my dog, I festered in my feelings.
Pen sketch of a girl and a dog.
Daily tasks became difficult. I was no longer self-motivated. Letting my dog outside in the morning to pee was my reason to wake up, doing manual labor all day was my reason to eat, the heat of the summer was my reason to drink water. The daily tasks my body required were a struggle when my mind was such a mess. Mealtimes were especially fraught, and I often wished that feeding myself was as simple as feeding the dog. If only I could survive on three scoops of kibble a day.
Food demanded my attention in a way that nothing else did. The process of planning and cooking my dinners consumed most of my mental energy that wasn’t spent recounting all my mistakes and wondering what good could possibly come from a future without my ex-girlfriend. It was as if it was no longer my brain’s job to keep me healthy. Rather, that responsibility fell on my body, which communicated through aches and pains, thirsts and hungers, that I needed to take care of myself.
I listened and obeyed these demands to the best of my ability. Every evening, I would half-heartedly slice, dice, sautee, and stir fry until my meal came together, always with the TV on in the other room to drown out the silence of the empty house.
Pen sketch of a knife cutting a tomato in half.
The smells of cooking usually upset my stomach enough that by the time the food was ready, it already looked unappetizing. I had to focus on my breathing with each bite. After a while, my plate would be as clean as I could manage. I’d give Ginger whatever scraps I could and toss the rest of my food in the garbage. Repeat every night for a month.
You don’t realize until you’re cooking and eating every meal alone just how essential food is for socialization. Shared meals exist throughout the life course: dinners out with friends, school lunch during highschool, snack times in kindergarten, even bottle-feeding as a child. Though they take different forms, mealtimes are cemented in our brains from childhood as important social ceremonies. So in the moments of our lives where we cannot or choose not to share meals with others, it’s important to ask why and to what effect. For me after my breakup, I was mostly forced to eat alone, which compounded the sadness and emotional exhaustion I was already struggling with.
But this is not the singular, universal experience of eating alone, despite how common it is. The ubiquity of the “depression meal”, which Urban Dictionary defines as a meal that “takes little to no preparation, due to the lack of mental and physical energy experienced during depression,” speaks to the commonality of the struggle to eat while depressed. (See “r/DepressionMeals”, a subreddit dedicated to photos of the meals people struggling with their mental health have prepared for themselves, for examples ranging from baby food to pickles.) While not stated explicitly, these aren’t meals usually shared with friends. Rather, they are enjoyed (or not) in isolating moments that can aggravate feelings of depression and loneliness. This connection is substantiated by research and statistics, which suggest a correlation between poor mental health and unhealthy eating habits in men and women (Sarlio-Lähteenkorva, et al., 2004). So too is this relationship between mental health and eating behaviors validated by artists and writers.
Li-Young Lee writes in his poem aptly titled “Eating Alone”, “white rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas // fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame // oil and garlic. And my own loneliness. // What more could I, a young man, want.” Taking similar inspiration, songwriter Jeffrey Lewis sings half-jokingly about the experience of going to a restaurant alone in his song “When You’re By Yourself”. “And when you have to go to the bathroom // You can’t leave your stuff, you have to take it // You have to take your backpack and jacket with you // In the bathroom of a restaurant when you’re by yourself,” He sings with a slightly awkward, indie-tremble to his voice.
But we don’t need poems, songs, or statistics to understand that our habits around food– what we eat and with whom– reflect our feelings. In my exploration of eating alone, I discovered quickly that this relationship is deceptively straightforward. It is not so simple as shared meals = good, solo meals = bad. People have wildly different feelings about mealtimes that don’t align so easily with this false binary.
I did not expect to find as much creative material as easily as I did when I began writing this article. It was as if the moment I began thinking about sharing meals and eating alone, something clicked. I began to find inspiration for my writing all over the place. Looking around the dining hall, I noticed more people than ever sitting by themselves, headphones in their ears, wordlessly asking others not to approach them. At meal times in my co-op, I began to notice the people who would grab their plate and go upstairs to their rooms rather than to the lounge or dining space, where most people ate together.
One particularly memorable piece of creative fodder fell into my lap when some friends and I went out to lunch at Denny’s in a hunger-fueled pancake frenzy.
Pen sketch of a Denny’s sign.
As we were waiting for our food, an older looking man came in and sat down by himself across the room from us. We exchanged concerned glances and frowns, the sight of an elderly person dining alone at a chain restaurant so disconcerting that we felt the need to interrupt our conversation to acknowledge the tension. We chatted on, though, and I continued to watch the man in the corner sip his coffee. Minutes went by. Every so often, I would glance at the door, waiting for a similarly aged man or woman to walk through and join the lonely diner. Eventually the man was joined by a friend and the two ordered their cups of coffee and began talking. I nudged Isobel, who was sitting next to me, and nodded my head toward the two men. Everyone exchanged another set of glances, this time of relief.
Whether we notice them or not, solo-diners are all around us. And though their presence may be unsettling or hard to watch for some, it is important to question why this is our gut reaction. Why did my friends and I exchange those looks? What about seeing the man in Denny’s, the head-phoned people in the dining hall, or my fellow co-opers heading up the stairs elicits such pity? I have spent a lot of time over the past few months thinking and talking with my friends about eating alone, and I believe the answer to this question lies in the sometimes-involuntary nature of eating by yourself and the social expectations around mealtimes.
For me during my break up I could not eat with others. My family was gone and eating out with friends wasn’t really an option for me as I struggled with my mental health. We sometimes have no choice but to eat by ourselves. Even at times when it appears that we have a choice, or that we hypothetically could be eating with others, there are forces outside of our control that keep us from choosing to eat in a group. The feeling of alienation can keep us from reaching out and making connections to the people who surround us. Even though we may technically be able to sit down with a group of people, it doesn’t always feel like a possibility in the moment.
Even with this understanding of social dynamics, we usually assume the worst of solo-diners: that they don’t have any choice but to be alone. In my exploration of eating alone, I’d like to challenge the image of the outcasted, involuntary lone diner. Not because this image is always inaccurate, but because, importantly, not all solo-diners are lonely. At the same time as we recognize the legitimacy of loneliness while eating alone, we can open ourselves up to the possibility (and reality) of a multitude of emotions associated with eating by ourselves. Which is exactly what I tried to do while conducting research for this article.
“I have this fantasy of taking myself out to a big steak dinner,” my friend Olivia tells my friends and I at lunch one day, “After the opening night of my show, I’m going to take myself out and order the most expensive steak on the menu– and the cheapest glass of red wine.” My friends laugh, half at the idea of the most expensive steak paired with the cheapest wine, and half at the idea of Olivia sitting by herself at a restaurant. I scribble the quote down in my notebook.
Pen sketch of my friend Olivia.
A few days later, I brought up eating alone in conversation again, hoping to gather more writing material. “I love eating alone,” smiles Lilly in response to my question, “Well, I love cooking alone, for myself. No siblings in the house and no parents, just eating quietly by myself.” More scribbling.
Pen sketch of my friend Lily.
“Co-op meals are just too overwhelming,” Franklin admits to me in response to a question about why they go to their room during meals. I understand where they’re coming from, co-op meals are usually 60-80 people sitting together in the lounge or outside on the lawn. They pause, then laugh, “And I like to watch TV.”
Pen sketch of my friend Franklin.
Sometimes, I didn’t have to ask any questions at all to get people talking about eating alone. “We always ate family dinners as a kid, so now I feel like I can choose whether or not I’m with people when I eat. That’s me time, you know?” one stranger in the print studio says to another in a serendipitous conversation about eating alone that I happened to overhear.
Through these conversations, I have come to believe that it is the voluntary nature of their dining experience that allows them to enjoy and even seek out their time eating alone. All the positive experiences of eating alone that I heard about were from people who chose to be by themselves. I decided that it must be something about the choice that makes it fun for them, and depressing for me.
But I had to put my theory to the test. Since the moment I thought up the pitch for this article, it was obvious to me that I couldn’t merely think and talk about eating alone– I would have to do it myself. Ideally, in a way I haven’t before: out at a restaurant. Restaurants are already a stressful environment for me, even when I’m with a group of friends. Lots of noise, pressure to talk, speaking with strangers– the ritual is overwhelming as is. Factor in the added anxiety of being by myself… suffice to say, I was not feeling confident. I needed help, and so I turned to the internet for guidance.
When you Google anything, one of the first results is the auto-generated “People also ask” box, which shows you questions people often ask Google that are related to your initial search. If you search “eating alone”, Google tells you that people also ask: “Is it normal to go eat alone? What is the benefit of eating alone? What is the symptom of eating alone? What is the anxiety of eating alone?” Despite the Google AI’s poor grammar choices, I had to admit that I was grappling with many of the same dilemmas. I kept on scrolling, hoping to find some search result that might bode better for my night out alone. I found a New York Times article from 2019 titled “How to Eat Alone (and Like It)”, which would serve as my guide for the evening.
The article includes five pieces of advice that supposedly make it fun and rewarding to enjoy a night out by yourself. I wasn’t able to follow all of the instructions, partially because I am not 21 and cannot “toast myself” like one section of the article suggests, and partially because I was too afraid to “dine alone, but engage with others.” But the article helped me form a strategy that was good to have on hand.
I decided to visit the Feve, arguably the most classic Oberlin restaurant, because I thought the idea of eating a burger and fries (well, tater tots) alone was the quintessential image of the solo-diner, and I hoped to replicate it. The place was buzzing when I walked in, filled with prospective students and their parents who were visiting campus for this weekend’s All Roads activities. The frazzled hostess approached me and asked, “How many?” and I wordlessly held up one finger and smiled painfully. I told her I’d rather sit at a table than the bar, and she put me at the closest corner table with a menu and a glass of water. My head was on a swivel from that point on, anxiously scanning the room to see if anyone was looking at me. A few people were.
Pen sketch of the Feve’s storefront.
Mostly, my time at the Feve was spent journaling. I kept track of my thoughts and observations as they came to me, stream-of-consciousness style scribbling them down until my burger was delivered. I thought that writing might make me look cooler and more mysterious (and less sad) than scrolling on my phone. No one in the restaurant had to know I was just writing “oh my god oh my god oh my god” over and over again.
Between lines in my journal, I re-scanned the space. There were two adults (one woman looked maybe 45 and the other in her sixties) sitting by themselves at the bar a few seats apart from one another. Both were reading, taking bites every few pages. I straightened up in my chair a bit. I thought about the many times I’ve gone to Slow Train by myself to read and enjoy my coffee. Was this really so different?
Pen sketch of two women sitting at the bar.
But even as the sight of other solo-diners calmed my nerves, I couldn’t help but look at the long row of two-person tables filled with pairs of people. People on dates, fathers and daughters, siblings, friends. I thought back to the last time I had visited the Feve, with my parents, and felt the familiar ache of loneliness in my chest. I pushed my food further away from me. I was ready to go home.
I walked about the Feve feeling uncertain of my experience. My belly was full, but something about the last hour and fifteen minutes felt unsatisfying. I hadn’t accomplished what I sought to. Eating alone that night was a brand new experience, yet something about it was familiar. The sense of loneliness, of just wanting it to be over, were the same feelings I’d had almost a year ago after my break up. Had I discovered that eating alone didn’t have to be lonely? Or did I just prove the opposite– that despite doing it voluntarily, eating by yourself really is just a sad time?
In the days since my meal at the Feve, I have tried to answer these questions and make sense of my experience. I don’t think that I disproved my theory that doing it voluntarily is what makes eating alone more enjoyable. No matter how lonely or anxious I was, eating at the Feve was still much more pleasant than eating alone in my living room. I got to reflect in my journal and read a few chapters of my book. I spent quality time with myself. Like the stranger in the print lab said, I felt empowered by the ability to choose to spend time alone. Like Franklin said, I appreciated that I wasn’t forced to have a conversation with anyone or sit in a big group. Like Olivia, I got to enjoy a food that I don’t normally get to eat in my vegetarian co-op. The more I thought about it, the more my experience aligned with those of people who enjoy eating by themselves.
If I were to eat alone more often, I’m sure that the positive aspects of the experience would grow stronger and stronger. The first time doing anything is hard, especially when you’re doing it by yourself. It is okay that my first time at a restaurant alone was not transformative. Probably, it will never be so magical. But it will never be like last summer, alone on my couch with the TV on. It couldn’t be because this time I am in charge. And that feels good.
Works Cited
“Depression Meal.” Urban Dictionary, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Depression+Meal.
Lee, Li-young. “Eating Alone by Li-Young Lee – Poems | Academy of American Poets.” Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, https://poets.org/poem/eating-alone.
Mchugh, Jess. “How to Eat Alone (and Like It).” The New York Times, The New York Times, 31 Oct. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/smarter-living/how-to-eat-alone-and-like-it.html.
Sarlio-Lähteenkorva, Sirpa, et al. “Mental Health and Food Habits among Employed Women and Men.” Appetite, vol. 42, no. 2, 2004, pp. 151–156., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2003.08.014.
Lewis, Jeffrey. “When You’re By Yourself.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMqbLfPupWg.
Ruby Feurstein is a second year Oberlin student from rural Pennsylvania. Ruby loves growing, cooking, and eating food. She cooks lunch every Wednesday at Harkness cooperative, where she lives and dines.
