Eating Alone
Looking back at my life, I realise that I have never lived alone. For all my preferring to be solitary, and being fairly anti-social, I have always lived with other people.
I thought about this over the weekend, when for twenty-four hours (a whole twenty-four hours!) I was alone with my own company. This because Alison was down in Brighton giving a paper at some day conference, and took advantage of it to stay a couple of nights with Jorj and Maggie, while Naomi was visiting some friends from uni days.
The oddest thing about this time was eating alone. And I found myself wondering whether eating alone isn't actually some kind of unnatural practice. (To add to many others we might think of.) There are some meals I prefer to eat alone, and get quite stressed if someone else is around. Breakfast is one of these: not my best time of day, when I prefer to read a book with my toast or cereal, as a preventive to biting off the heads of passing innocents. Lunch (on a working day) is the other, when the eating is also part of a necessary break. I have only recently and with reluctance accepted the idea of the 'working lunch' - barbaric notion! - and find that if I do consent to the occasional one, I usually need the afternoon off to recover, so its whole raison d'être is lost. But the meals I ate alone over this weekend were not among those I'm accustomed to.
Saturday lunch. I wanted to be in town anyway, so I went to All Bar One in the High. And there, eating alone was definitely odd and unnatural: I seemed to be the only person doing it. Everyone else in the place was part of a couple, or a small group of friends, or in one or two cases large and cosmopolitan groups including people from the South Seas and Southern Minnesota. Who found Oxford on a November day bitterly cold. It didn't even help, pretending to be a writer or intellectual, because it was all too busy and crowded.
Saturday tea. That was OK because I watched a video (guilty, solitary pleasure!)
Sunday lunch. Now, the sensible thing, if I had had my wits about me, would have been to prepare for this in advance by either a) inviting someone round for lunch, or b) getting someone else to invite me. But since I seldom have my wits about me, I hadn't done (b), and really wouldn't inflict my cooking on anyone I liked enough for (a). At the same time, I didn't want just a microwaved meal out of the freezer, so I did cook myself a quarter chicken with roast potatoes. Which itself felt a strangely decadent thing to do, especially when it needed a couple of glasses of wine to accompany it. And gave me some small sense of how hard it is for married people suddenly left on their own, to go to the trouble of cooking for just one.
I think maybe we are not meant to eat alone.
I thought about this over the weekend, when for twenty-four hours (a whole twenty-four hours!) I was alone with my own company. This because Alison was down in Brighton giving a paper at some day conference, and took advantage of it to stay a couple of nights with Jorj and Maggie, while Naomi was visiting some friends from uni days.
The oddest thing about this time was eating alone. And I found myself wondering whether eating alone isn't actually some kind of unnatural practice. (To add to many others we might think of.) There are some meals I prefer to eat alone, and get quite stressed if someone else is around. Breakfast is one of these: not my best time of day, when I prefer to read a book with my toast or cereal, as a preventive to biting off the heads of passing innocents. Lunch (on a working day) is the other, when the eating is also part of a necessary break. I have only recently and with reluctance accepted the idea of the 'working lunch' - barbaric notion! - and find that if I do consent to the occasional one, I usually need the afternoon off to recover, so its whole raison d'être is lost. But the meals I ate alone over this weekend were not among those I'm accustomed to.
Saturday lunch. I wanted to be in town anyway, so I went to All Bar One in the High. And there, eating alone was definitely odd and unnatural: I seemed to be the only person doing it. Everyone else in the place was part of a couple, or a small group of friends, or in one or two cases large and cosmopolitan groups including people from the South Seas and Southern Minnesota. Who found Oxford on a November day bitterly cold. It didn't even help, pretending to be a writer or intellectual, because it was all too busy and crowded.
Saturday tea. That was OK because I watched a video (guilty, solitary pleasure!)
Sunday lunch. Now, the sensible thing, if I had had my wits about me, would have been to prepare for this in advance by either a) inviting someone round for lunch, or b) getting someone else to invite me. But since I seldom have my wits about me, I hadn't done (b), and really wouldn't inflict my cooking on anyone I liked enough for (a). At the same time, I didn't want just a microwaved meal out of the freezer, so I did cook myself a quarter chicken with roast potatoes. Which itself felt a strangely decadent thing to do, especially when it needed a couple of glasses of wine to accompany it. And gave me some small sense of how hard it is for married people suddenly left on their own, to go to the trouble of cooking for just one.
I think maybe we are not meant to eat alone.
posted by Tony at 11/22/2004 08:48:00 pm
4 Comments:
I totally agree! Eating alone is just re-fuelling really. There's something about eating - if you're doing it properly - that simply demands human interaction. I swear that's the only reason I stay thin - I have so many boring inadequate meals alone, but when I eat with others I love it and eat everything in sight. But Tony, how amazing NEVER to have lived alone. I can't believe it.
It's almost certainly a case of "the other man's grass" but, with three teenagers about the place and a husband who until July worked from home throughout our married life, I have truly loved the rare occasions when I get to eat alone. I suppose it's part of the same fantasy of flurried parents with over-populated lives, who imagine the joy of putting something down before they go out and finding it where you left in on your return...only really attractive because I know it's of a limited duration.
Though if it truly might lead to a Maggi like shape at the end of the day, I would be prepared to consider a longer term arrangement :-)
No it's true, I really never have lived alone. Never was a bachelor in a bachelor flat or any of that stuff. But one of the odd things for me was that this suddenly seemed odd: i.e. the realisation that it's far more common for people now to live alone at some early stage in life, rather than (as has been the case) only later on in life or in widow(er)hood. But surely this wasn't always a common thing? Is it something that only wealth and technology have made possible because we don't need the support of other human beings in the way people used to? We may not need it to survive physically, that is; but the emotional and spiritual needs aren't met by wealth and technology, surely? Or are there gender issues too? Sorry, I seem to be waffling aloud. Better stop and think some more before typing.
I don't think it's healthy to eat alone. I like food. A lot. But I only go overboard in private. No doubt some sort of contemporary pathology.
Another thing: I have had a number of memorable meals in my life, and at none of them was I alone. And I don't think this is just because I would be less likely to go to a good restaurant by myself.
I tend to reject most socio-biological arguments (you know, the old saw that what we did on the Savanah explains what we do now) but in this instance I think it is true. In prehistorical times we squatted together around the fire eating half-raw, half-burnt meat, and that is how we are most comfortable. (Well, but with more refined cooking...)
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