meals
We sit at the table to feed our bodies, but more often, it is our minds that are nourished. While food is universally recognized as essential for physical health, its significance reaches far beyond sustenance. Across cultures and centuries, meals have served as moments of connection between families, communities, and even strangers. While we usually focus on nutrition as related to our physical health, we overlook how it also impacts our mental health. In a world facing rising rates of loneliness, anxiety, and depression, shared meals offer more than comfort; they foster social bonds, provide emotional stability, and promote a sense of belonging. As we explore this deeper connection between shared meals and psychological well-being, we discover that eating together is a powerful tool for mental health.
Mental health is a state of mental well-being in which individuals realize their abilities, cope with normal stresses, work productively, and contribute to their communities (World Health Organization, n.d.). A crucial but sometimes overlooked component of this definition is the role of human connection. Social relationships directly impact emotional stability, self-worth, and resilience.
Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a foundational theory in human psychology, places “belongingness and love” immediately above basic psychological and safety needs, indicating that social bonds are essential to mental well-being (McLeod, 2025). This positioning suggests that forming and maintaining close relationships is a fundamental requirement for achieving psychological well-being and personal growth. In this context, shared meals represent more than just social tradition – they are regular, meaningful opportunities to fulfill our innate human need for connection.
Anthropologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss have long argued that cooking and sharing food is central to culture formation itself. Meals are rarely just about nutrients; they are social rituals that reinforce identity, values, and relationships. This understanding reveals why communal eating practices are so deeply embedded in cultures and daily routines worldwide. Korean “table culture”, for instance, exemplifies the significance of eating together as a form of respect and intimacy. Unlike Western-style dining conventions, in which meals are plated individually, Korean meals center around shared dishes placed in the middle of the table.
Hotpots and stews like budae-jjigae are served in a single pot from which everyone eats together, symbolizing mutual care and unity. This dining style naturally fosters conversation and connection as diners coordinate, serve one another, and share responsibility for the communal dining experience. Similarly, Mediterranean societies such as those in Greece and Italy place strong emphasis on home and family as the heart of social life. Mealtimes often stretch for hours, featuring multiple courses served slowly to allow time for storytelling, laughter, and emotional exchange (UNESCO, n.d.). Religious traditions also highlight the role of food in cultivating belonging.
The Jewish Seder meal is a highly symbolic gathering that commemorates collective memory, shared struggle, and spiritual identity through symbolic foods that tell the Passover story (Jacobs, n.d.). These diverse practices, from family dining table to religious ritual, demonstrate how eating together fosters empathy, communication, and cohesion, across geography and belief systems, providing the emotional stability and sense of belonging that are core elements of psychological well-being.
Eating together has long been a cultural cornerstone in societies across the globe, but this tradition may be rooted in more than just sentiment or habit. In South Korea, where communal dining is deeply embedded in daily life, a 2018 study involving nearly 5,000 elderly individuals found a striking association between regular family meals and lower levels of depression and anxiety. Even after controlling for socioeconomic and health variables, those who dined with family three times daily reported significantly fewer depressive symptomes and suicidal thoughts than those who ate alone.
Crucially, this effect followed a dose-response pattern: the more often people ate with loved ones, the greater the mental health benefit (Kang, 2018). This illustrates that shared meals function not merely as moments of routine but as structured spaces for emotional connection and psychological reinforcement. The mental health advantages of communal eating extend beyond human social customs into the realm of evolutionary biology. A 2014 study on wild chimpanzees in Uganda found that food-sharing events resulted in significantly higher urinary oxytocin levels compared to non-sharing interactions.
This oxytocin surge, more potent than that triggered by grooming, suggests that sharing food taps into ancient neural circuits linked to bonding, care, and reward (Wittig, 2014). Like how this study shows, oxytocin plays a vital role in reducing anxiety, building trust, and promoting emotional closeness; all of which are critical for resilience and psychological stability. Thus, science has proven that when humans share meals, we engage in a biologically meaningful ritual that strengthens social ties and reduces psychological distress.
In today’s fast-paced, increasingly urbanized world, this simple act of eating together is even becoming surprisingly rare. Let’s think about why. Long work hours, fragmented schedules, and lingering post-pandemic isolation have led more people to dine alone. Yet the decline of shared meals carries hidden costs. Beyond nutrition, communal eating provides structure, connection, and emotional grounding—elements many are missing in modern life.
Recognizing this, some governments and institutions are reintroducing communal meals not as luxury, but as public health interventions. Japan’s shokuiku policy, for example, is a national food and nutrition education initiative aimed at promoting healthy eating habits, food knowledge, and family meals to improve public health and well-being. This program teaches children the value of mindful eating and family meals as part of emotional and social development (Takimoto, 2015). Local community kitchens and senior meal programs have also shown encouraging results, in the form of reduced loneliness and depressive symptoms among participants. These examples reveal that shared meals are active interventions that can restore a sense of belonging in an otherwise disconnected society (Iacovou, 2012).
While shared meals can foster emotional connection and mental well-being, it is important to acknowledge that they are not inherently positive for everyone. In certain situations, such as toxic family environments, mealtimes may become emotionally charged or even harmful. Instead of offering comfort and support, the dinner table may serve as a site of tension, criticism, or control, reinforcing power imbalances and emotional distress.
For individuals in such households, communal eating can heighten anxiety, rather than alleviate it. Beyond family dynamics, cultural and socio-economic barriers can also complicate the ideal of shared meals. Those facing food insecurity may find it logistically or financially impossible to participate, and social expectations around communal dining can unintentionally exclude or stigmatize individuals who lack the necessary resources. These complexities remind us that the value of shared meals does not lie solely in their frequency or tradition alone; the quality of interaction and the genuine sense of emotional safety and connection they provide is the key to having valuable shared meals.
In an increasingly fragmented world, shared meals offer far more than just sustenance. As demonstrated through scientific research and cultural practices worldwide, eating together cultivates a sense of belonging and trust, reinforcing the idea that food serves not merely as physical fuel but as a form of emotional nourishment that is essential for mental health. Recognizing this connection, it is time for public health discourse and policy to treat shared eating as a strategic tool for mental wellness.
To build healthier societies, we must restore the table as a place not only for filling our body, but for healing. This begins with small, practical steps: families can prioritize even one shared meal a day without screens; schools and workplaces can implement communal lunch spaces to foster connection; and communities can support inclusive meal programs that welcome the elderly, the isolated, and the food insecure. Ultimately, the power of a shared meal lies in its ability to make us feel seen, heard, and valued, and that is something within everyone’s reach. Now, let’s bring people back to the table, where healing begins!
By: Hyojung Park
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