Breaking Bread

Report on a National Survey for The Big Lunch

by
Professor Robin Dunbar
Department of Experimental Psychology
University of Oxford

Breaking bread together provides one of the most important contexts in which we both
get to know new friends and reinforce old relationships. Taking the time to sit down
together over a meal helps create social networks that in turn have profound effects on
our physical and mental health, our happiness and wellbeing, and even our sense of
purpose in life. It makes us feel more engaged with the community we live in, and more
willing to engage with the tasks of the day ahead.
One reason why this is so is that the act of eating together triggers the endorphin system
in the brain. Endorphins are part of the brains pain control mechanism and form a core
part of the social bonding mechanism in primates, including of course humans. Eating
together triggers the endorphin system in two quite separate ways, one direct and one
indirect. The direct one is that the endorphins are involved in the mechanisms involved in
satiation, perhaps because the fact that the stomach is stretched stresses the tissues
involved. The indirect process is that when we eat together we invariably laugh a great
deal, and laughter has been shown to trigger the endorphin system.
The Big Lunch provides an opportunity to encourage people to break bread together and
through this to get to know each other better. To explore this question, a stratified national
survey of the UK, balanced for regional population, age and gender, was used to sample
2000 adults aged 18-80 years in the second week of April 2016. The survey consisted of
34 questions about peoples experiences of eating together.
Of the approximately 20 meals that people on average have each week, they eat no less
than 30% alone, and this is as likely to be the evening meal as it is breakfast. No less than
75% of people said they eat their lunch alone at their desks because they were too busy to
take time out. On average, people spend only 12 and a half minutes on their weekday
lunch. Only 35% of people said they ate their evening meal with someone else. No less
than 45% of people said there was no particular reason why they ate alone only 15%
did so because they lived alone and just 9% did so because they worked shifts.
Astonishingly, as many as 25% of people said they always ate alone at the weekends, not
all of them because they lived alone. The over-55s were both more likely than younger
people to eat alone and also more likely to eat in company (suggesting a clearer split into

more social and less social individuals), although overall there were no consistent
differences across age in the number of meals eaten alone each week.
We asked how often people ate with people other than their immediate family. Nearly
70% said they had never had a meal with a neighbour, 15% had never had a meal with a
work colleague, 32% had never done so with a boss or manager, and 37% had never had
a meal with a community group. As one might expect, most people did have meals with
family and friends, but even so 15% said they hadnt had a meal with other family
members in the last six months, 30% said they hadnt done so with a best friend in the
last six months, and 45% hadnt done so with an old friend. As many as 65% felt there
was someone they should make more effort to see or spend time with, and 75% thought
that was best done by sharing a meal. Women were more likely to have eaten with all
these people than men, although in each case the difference was modest.
On average, respondents had last had lunch with a good friend or family member only
within the last month, and that had most often consisted of just two people (including
themselves). The same was true of the last time they had had an evening meal with a
close friend or family member, with slightly more people being typically involved
(lunches were most likely to involve just two people, whereas evening meals were more
likely to involve four). Dinner parties, it seems, are now much more intimate affairs
(typically just two couples) than they once were. It is worth noting that the average size
of these lunch and dinner groups (3.5, including the respondent) was exactly the same as
the average size of free-forming conversational groups (for example, those in pubs or
other public venues). Our many studies of freely forming conversations have consistently
shown that these never contain more than four individuals for any length of time, and
have an average upper limit at about 3.5 individuals (conversations with more than four
individuals fission into two very quickly).
We asked several questions about life satisfaction. No less than 31% felt dissatisfied with
their life, 33% had not felt especially happy on the day before and 30% felt that what they
did in their life was not especially worthwhile. As many as 54% of people felt they could
not trust the people they met, and 70% said they did not feel especially engaged with
their local community.
We plotted these indices of life satisfaction against various measures of how often
respondents said that they ate meals with other people. No matter what index of social
eating we use, we found that how often people ate socially was significantly correlated
with how satisfied they were with their life, how happy they had felt on the previous day,
how worthwhile they felt their life was, how much they trusted people, how engaged they
felt with their local community, and how many close friends and family they had whom
they felt they could rely on and this was true even when we controlled for their age and
sex.

The figure below illustrates this with one of these social indices (the number of close
family and friends) plotted against how often respondents ate their evening meal with
someone else. Those who rarely ate socially had many fewer friends or family they could
count on for moral, social, emotional or financial support when they needed it. Typically,
across the population as a whole this averages about five individuals, but those who
mostly ate alone had as few as half this number. The same was true of the other social
indices listed above. Since the number of close friends someone has directly affects their
health and wellbeing, this can be expected to have serious social and health
consequences.

Mean number of close friends and family that a respondent could rely on plotted
against how often they reported eating their evening meal with other people.
Bars represent 2 standard errors of the mean.

Asked if they wanted to get to know someone new, most people (35%) felt that a
lunchtime meal would be the most appropriate, with only 24% opting for an evening
meal and 17% having no preference. Women showed a much greater preference for a
lunchtime meeting (41% against 20% for an evening event), with men typically
preferring the evening (30% vs 25%). In contrast, 34% of people felt that an evening
meal would be the better occasion to meet up with an old friend or family member, with
30% opting for a lunch event. Although women still preferred a lunchtime event (34%), a
much higher proportion of them (32%) opted for an evening event in this case. Only 4%
of people said they wouldnt suggest a meal as a way to meet.
We wondered what it is about eating together that contributed to the sense of engagement
we have when we eat socially. We asked respondents to rate how much closer they felt to
the people they had had an evening meal (on a 0 = not at all to 10 = a great deal) and to
say whether or not there had been laughter, jokes, singing, dancing, telling of
reminiscences, party games had been played, chocolate had been eaten or alcohol drunk.
Of these, only the occurrence of laughter and reminiscences (and to a lesser extent jokes)
significantly predicted how much closer respondents felt, when we control for age and
sex.

Median rating of how much closer respondents felt to the other people with whom they
had an evening meal depending on whether (grey bars) or not (white bars)
the meal was accompanied by laughter or reminisces.
[Boxes indicates 50% range; whiskers indicate 95% ranges]

In sum:
adults in the UK took around 30% of their meals alone, even at the weekends

as many as three-quarters of the working population said that they took their
lunch alone or at their desk because they were too busy to socialise with their
workmates
a surprisingly high proportion said they had never eaten a meal with a neighbour,
or even with a local community group or club
a third of people felt dissatisfied with their life and two-thirds felt they were not
engaged with their local community
most people felt that lunch was the best place to meet someone new, but an
evening meal was better for meeting family or friends, with such events typically
consisting of just 3.5 people on average (just enough people to manage a single
conversation)
The more often people ate with others, the more likely they were to be satisfied
with their life, feel happy, felt their life was worthwhile, trusted others, felt
engaged with their local community and had more friends and family on whom
they could call for support
Laughter and reminiscences seemed to be the most important components of a
social meal that made us feel closer to those with whom we have just eaten

It seems, in the light of this, that in the UK we are becoming increasingly less socially
engaged, and are making increasingly less use of that central engine of household, family
and community engagement breaking bread together. In these increasingly fraught
times when community cohesion is becoming ever more important, making time for and
joining in communal meals is perhaps the single most important thing we could do both
for our own health and wellbeing and for community cohesion.