Eating Alone Can Be Your Virtuoso Moment

Okay, so where am I?

I’m at a local eatery working, of course, on finding the next big idea. The last few years have been fruitful on my pursuit of these grand plans for advertising and marketing grandeur. It never stops. But the quest for being great should never stop. Employers and businesses want that. They demand it actually and I am one to oblige them at every time.

My work should be a performance of sorts; at least in the advertising world. My ego tells me that I’m on the payroll is because the people paying my bills want to see me perform for the same reason you went to see Baryshnikov dance, Christian Bale act or the sun set over the white sands of Hawaii. It’s art in the form of advertising. It’s not work, it’s a recital. I can’t be just an ad man. I must be a virtuoso. Itzhak Perlman with a violin. Michelangeli at the piano. Gretzky with the puck.

I don’t play the ad game where everyone else does. I play it behind the scenes. I don’t bluster in meetings trying to charm people to go forward with my ideas. I work in the sanctity of my office, or offsite, sifting through muse and the magic of data. I come in for a landing every now and then, usually with a creative brief fresh from the design team. Sometimes I get the feeling my colleagues don’t know where I have gone until I plop the brief down in an email and shout “right over here.”

Yet I digress…

So why am I not in the office collaborating all “think tank-like” in a brainstorming session, you ask? Eating alone has become a crucial aspect of modern living. The commuter, the businessperson, the student—everyone is doing it these days and according to the Great Britain’s Wellbeing Index nearly a third of adults in major metropolitan cities are eating alone “most or all of the time.” I remember in high school doing things solo was a red flag that you were an irreversible loner, or worse, a Unibomber type. Things are different now, as we’ve become less embarrassed about solo dining habits. Bookings websites report that reservations for one have soared, home delivery of meals is a cottage industry, while communal and cafeteria tables are increasingly popular in restaurants everywhere.

Unaccompanied dietary habits are steering us into unexplored terrain. Group dining has long been a universal human ceremony. Not only is it sensible (more hands make lighter work) but meals have, customarily been used to meet our essential need to connect with others. The multi-generational family meals that were often lore of television ads are going the way of dial-up modems. Take a look at Peggy's pitch about "connecting" for their advertising pitch.

The concept of communal dining existed from the 1960s until present day, but despite the fact that the default number that cookbook recipes serve is still four or six, changes are afoot. Most of us are time-poor and overworked (at least in our own mind). Eating alone, at least for me, has turned into a brilliant space to image campaigns. As I wrote earlier in the year, (and not just Taco Bell) best Big Ideas can be found in the smooth future heartburn of a Taco Bell quesadilla with fire sauce food. 

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The trend for eating alone has contributed to the popularity of hummus and guacamole dips for less polished lone cooks who aren’t seasoned enough to whip up 15-minute meals out of those new bestsellers or get expensive Postmates or DoorDash. The boom in dips can be ascribed to people eating on their own because they are so simple to consume if you’re concurrently in a hurry and eating alone. It’s a combination of getting into a habit of thinking it’s not worth cooking for yourself mixed with comfort.

The splendor of independent dining is that you are free to savor your guilty pleasure without judgment from others. Mealtimes now are an ideal way to have quality time to yourself. It becomes a blurred border between work and pleasure and that makes work seem less like, “work.”

Another thing that may entice you to dine alone is your waistline. Eating with other actually makes you eat more and the bigger your group, the more you eat. Take a  dinner for two—you’ll eat approximately one-third more than you would alone. A party of four? Plan to increase your consumption as much as 75%, because that’s what happens on average.

Trust me and the forty plus pounds I’ve left behind this year while eating alone. Try it and you make just discover the Big Ideas you’ve left on the communal dining table.