There’s something unique about eating together that’s good for us

BBC Future

Arguably the strongest evidence comes from the World Happiness Report – a yearly analysis of wellbeing based on a global survey from the opinion polling company Gallup. In 2024, the company was sponsored by the Japanese food manufacturer Ajinomoto to add a section on people’s eating habits, which included the following questions: 

Thinking about the last 7 days …
(1) On how many days did you eat lunch with someone you know?
(2) On how many days did you eat dinner with someone you know?” 

“My eyes lit up when I saw,” De Neve says, who co-authored a chapter on the importance of commensality in the latest World Happiness Report. “We’re looking at about 150,000 individuals around the world who responded to that question.” 

De Neve’s team found that the more meals that people shared with others, the higher they scored on standard measures of emotional wellbeing, with quite astonishing consistency. “It was as predictive of someone’s life satisfaction as their employment status and your relative income,” he says – two factors that are known to be enormously important for wellbeing.