There is a universal condiment in our meals that has been gaining weight in recent years: a screen in front of the plate. It doesn’t matter if it’s breakfast in a hurry, lunch at the desk next to the keyboard or dinner on the couch after a tiring day: we chew while we scroll with the same automation with which we breathe.
The act of eating without watching something – short vertical videos, a series, a ten-minute video – has gone from being common to being almost unnatural. As if food alone wasn’t enough of a stimulus for those fifteen minutes.
There are circumstances that lead us to eat alone: life without a partner, teleworking, studies, a work trip or the dynamics of the cubicle in the office. They have all converged on the same ritual: the screen is no longer an occasional accompaniment but the defining framework of the modern food experience. The problem is not physical loneliness but the inability to be present even when we are accompanied.
We have reconfigured the meal: now it is down time that must be optimized. Eating has become an annoying biological need that interrupts our real life, the one that takes place on the screens. That’s why we eat watching youtubes: not to make the meal more enjoyable, but to not waste those minutes on something as banal as feeding ourselves.
The screen rescues us from the terrible inefficiency of simply eating. It allows us to continue consuming information, entertainment, and social validation, while we fill our mouths.
And here’s something darker: shared food has been, for millennia, the fundamental social glue. It is no coincidence that all religions have food rituals, that all important agreements are sealed with banquets, that the word “companion” comes etymologically from “sharing bread”.
When eating in front of screens—alone or with others— Not only do we lose conversation, we lose daily training in reciprocity, in the rhythms of giving and receiving that structure all social life.. A child who grows up having dinner parked with TikTok learns that communication is one-way, that entertainment requires no mutual effort, that the presence of the other is optional and, ultimately, substitutable.
The market, of course, has detected this trend with its usual precision. Food products are now designed for one-person and one-handed consumption: bowls that do not require a knife, wraps that free the hand of scroll, snacks dosed for intermittent snacking between stories.
The apps of delivery They’ve perfected the art of solitary gratification, with algorithms that learn your cravings and anticipate them. The entire food ecosystem is reconfigured around this new atomized diner who eats without consciousness, chews without tasting, swallows without sharing. It is the taylorization definitive of the act of eating: efficient, individual, stripped of any ritual or social dimension.
But without a doubt, The most disturbing of all is our discomfort when someone eats alone without a screen in a public space.. That individual who simply eats, looking into space or at his plate, is disturbing to us. What are you thinking about? Why don’t you get distracted? Don’t you feel the pressure to appear busy, connected, relevant?
Its simple presence lays bare our own inability to be alone, our addiction to digital mediation in even the most basic acts. We have reached a point where loneliness without a screen is read as social failure, as if not having notifications during meals were a sign of irrelevance.
The final paradox is worthy of chef kiss: We have never been more connected and we have never eaten more alone. We exchange memes while ignoring whoever is in front of us, we document dishes that no one will share with us, we perform a digital social life while our analog social life atrophies.
When anthropologists of the future study our civilization, they may wonder how a species that evolved by sharing food around a fire ended up staring at glowing rectangles while chewing in solitude, convinced that this was progress.
Featured image | Xataka
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