Embrace your guilty pleasures
While “solo dining” might conjure up images of a corner booth at a cafe or a bar stool at a local restaurant, the ultimate solo dining experience is eating home alone. It’s when we’re home alone — with no one watching what we’re eating, how or where — that our quirks, eccentricities and guilty pleasures come out.
Samantha Widder, now a graduate adviser for the food studies program at New York University, spent several months during her own graduate studies gathering accounts from 150 people of their food habits when eating alone. Responses showed a wide spectrum of food experiences, representing the joys, stigmas and even fears around eating alone. (One respondent said he would eat only soft food when eating by himself, for fear he would choke.)
“I was thinking that I was going to find more of a celebratory tone, and there was more shame than I expected,” Ms. Widder said.
People described eating frozen food, takeout leftovers in bed, cold cuts slathered in mustard, and in more than one case an entire box of crackers with an entire block of cheese.
“Personally, I find that if there’s no one around then I can almost celebrate those habits and those things,” Ms. Widder said, citing a love of processed food. Whether people felt fear or freedom, shame or pleasure seemed to come down to their own attitude.
For her part, Ms. Widder said she found a certain comfort in the ubiquity of eating alone in a place like New York City. After all, if you’re eating old pickles out of the fridge in a Brooklyn apartment, chances are that more than one neighbor is, too.
Toast to yourself
If dining alone still carries stigma and anxiety for many people, drinking alone might be the last frontier. But as Victoria James, a New York City sommelier and the beverage director at Cote, explained, treating yourself to a quality cocktail or a glass of wine can play a part in the richness of the experience. “I think that the best way to savor a beverage when you’re alone is just sort of have that recognition; toast to yourself,” she said. “I think it’s a really beautiful thing. So first and foremost, celebrate that moment.”
