The importance of sharing meals is recognised across cultures, from the Jewish Shabbat meal to the fast-breaking Iftar meals during Ramadan.
The known link between food and social relationships is ancient. The English word companion, the French copain (friend) and the Italian compagno (partner) come from the Latin cum and pānis – literally “with-bread”.
The Chinese term for companion/partner (伙伴) stems from a similar term (火伴) which literally translates to “fire mate”, a reference to sharing meals over a campfire.
But how important is eating together to our happiness? This is the question that I and my co-authors answer in the World Happiness Report 2025. In our new data and analysis we looked at the link between how often people share meals and whether they feel good about their lives and experience positive emotions.
We also documented that there was a massive difference between countries and regions when it came to how often people shared meals.
Comparing the statistics from the 2022-23 Gallup World Poll about sharing meals with standard measures of wellbeing, we found a significant, positive relationship in almost all regions. Not only do countries where meal sharing is more common tend to report higher levels of wellbeing, but this is true even when comparing people who live in the same country.
The Gallup poll asked more than 150,000 people from 142 countries and territories how many lunches and dinners they shared with someone they know during the past week. The scores varied widely between regions.
Latin Americans share approximately two-third of their meals, with residents of Paraguay, Ecuador and Colombia reporting an average of more than ten shared meals per week.
At the bottom of the scale, there are relatively low levels of meal sharing in south and east Asian countries – in particular India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Japan and South Korea, where people share less than one meal out of three, on average.
While there is an association between sharing meals and wellbeing pretty much everywhere, this association is stronger in some regions than others.
For instance, for a person who always dines alone in North America, Australia and New Zealand, the wellbeing benefit of starting to share most of their meals (eight or more times a week) in the life evaluation scale is big (the life evaluation scale is how people judge their life, with zero being the worst possible life and 10 being the best).
This boost is equivalent to the effect of doubling their income.
However, in Latin America, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa, this effect is half as great and is essentially nil in south-east Asia. The reasons for this difference is as yet unclear.
For social scientists, the frequency of sharing meals offers an indicator for social connectedness (the ways that people interact with and relate to one another). Unlike measures that capture people’s subjective feelings about social wellbeing, the number of shared meals gives us a concrete measure on which to base our analysis.
While interpretations of friendship or perceptions of closeness may change over time or between countries, the number of meals shared with others does not.
Meal sharing by region and age:
Of course, those who share more meals can differ in many other aspects, but even when we take into account characteristics such as gender, age, income, living alone and people’s ability to meet basic needs for food, the relationship between sharing meals and wellbeing still holds strong.
While the global data we used was only introduced in 2022, some countries have collected information on meal sharing for longer.
In the United States, where the American Time Use Survey has been running for more than 20 years, we find clear evidence that with every passing year, Americans are dining alone more often, particularly young adults.
Today, 18 to 24-year-olds in the US are 90% more likely to eat every meal alone on a given day than they were in 2003. We also find that Americans who eat at least one meal with others report higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress, pain and sadness on that day.
How meals sharing is linked to emotions in the US:
From our data, we can’t tell how much of a wellbeing boost sharing an extra meal creates, and to what extent people share more meals because they are already happy, but it is reasonable to assume that it is not just the latter.
This would reflect previous research which has shown the importance of social capital (networks of social connections which are conducive to a well-functioning society) and the positive benefits of in-person interactions.
In a world where loneliness is increasingly recognised as a public health issue, rethinking how we gather around the table, and how often, could provide practical solutions to reduce social isolation and raise wellbeing.
Institutions where people routinely eat their meals together can play a critical role on this front. The other side of the coin is the surge in working from home, which could raise levels of solitude.
So, if you don’t have plans for lunch tomorrow, maybe this is the good moment to message someone you would like to spend more time with.
Alberto Prati, Assistant Professor in Economics, UCL
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
