Welcome to Season 2 of The Family Dinner Project Podcast! In each of our episodes, Content Manager Bri DeRosa and Executive Director Dr. Anne Fishel will talk through tough topics related to family meals. Pull up a chair and grab a plate — we’re serving up real talk about family dinner! You can get caught up on older episodes here. 

A groundbreaking global study has just shown what we suspected all along: Eating together does make us happier! On this episode of The Family Dinner Project Podcast, Annie and Bri sit down with one of the study’s co-authors, Micah Kaats, to dive deep into what he and his team learned about happiness and shared meals.

Key Takeaways:

• Go to 1:50 for Micah’s overview of the key findings
• Go to 9:54 for a discussion about the clear upward trend in young people eating alone
• Go to 16:41 for a TFDP subscriber question about eating alone
• Go to 22:13 for a breakdown of cultural differences
• Go to 25:04 for a breakdown of gender differences
• Go to 32:06 for food, fun, and conversation ideas related to this episode

Related Episodes and Links:

• Episode 2 (“Is it the Family, or the Dinner?”)
• World Happiness Report 2025: Chapter 3
• Micah’s salad recipe
• Cat and Cow Game
• Try Not to Laugh Challenge

About Micah: Micah Kaats is a PhD candidate in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School where he researches the drivers and downstream effects of happiness and social connectedness. He also serves as a Research Associate for the Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford University and Senior Analyst for the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen. He has designed, implemented, and supervised studies of more than 20,000 participants in over 24 countries. His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Economist, Vox, and Forbes. He holds Master’s degrees in Applied Ethics and Economic Policy from Utrecht University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from UPenn.

Episode Transcript:

Bri DeRosa: Welcome back to the Family Dinner Project Podcast. I am Bri DeRosa, and joining me as always is Dr. Anne Fishel.

Dr. Anne Fishel: Great to be with you. 

Bri DeRosa: And we also, today, we’re very excited. We have a special guest in the studio with us. We are going to be talking with researcher Micah Kaats today, to dig into the results of the recent World Happiness Report. 

Micah and his co-author examined global data and they determined that shared meals actually have a significant impact on happiness, which I think Annie and I already suspected, but we didn’t realize the magnitude of the actual effect.

So Micah, welcome to the show. 

Micah Kaats: Thank you. It’s good to be here. Thank you so much for having me. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, thanks for joining us. And I just wanna dig right in and say, this study was actually pretty groundbreaking. It was the first of its kind, and it looked at a huge set of global data to determine how eating with other people impacts us exactly. And this is obviously very near and dear to our hearts, so we would love to start by having you just quickly outline some of the key findings from your work. 

Micah Kaats: Sure. Uh, yeah, so we’ve known for a little while that, uh, social connections are really important for people’s happiness and wellbeing. Um, but we haven’t actually surprisingly, at least from a research perspective, really dug into this particular forum for social connections of sharing meals or eating with others.

So in this chapter, we consider that head on and actually look at the relationship between sharing meals, dining alone, and wellbeing. And, uh, so we use our two main data sets in the chapter. One is, uh, some new data collected by Gallup from 142 countries, um, in 2022 and 2023. Basically asking a representative sample of individuals in all of these different countries, how many meals did you share with somebody that you know in the last week? How many lunches, how many dinners? And what’s really great about that is that we can also link that variable with a lot of the other variables that Gallup collects as part of their, uh, regular global surveys, people’s wellbeing, uh, their levels of happiness, sadness, stress, and so on.

So that was the first motivation to write the chapter that we can kinda have this really new rich data set that we can start to analyze. And we also look at some, some novel ways of looking at data from the American time use survey. This is a, a yearly survey in the United States that ask people basically how they spend their days.

Uh, it’s incredibly detailed. I think they sit people down for like literally an entire day, ask them to go through everything that they’ve done and how they felt while they were doing it, who they were with. So we also, uh, tried to look at that from a longitudinal perspective to see if meal sharing habits or changes in dining alone, how that has evolved over time, specifically looking at the United States.

So if I can just highlight a couple key takeaways from the chapter. I mean, the first thing that we notice is that when we look around the world, there’s huge variation in how often people share meals with each other. In some countries, people share on average, you know, 11 to 12 lunches and dinners per week. So almost every single day. Whereas in other countries, uh, people report sharing, you know, only two or three lunches and dinners per week. So that alone, I think was relatively striking, kind of a novel finding. We also found that sharing meals, uh, is really, really strongly correlated with wellbeing, uh, to an extent that that surprised us.

Even that, if you look at people who share more meals, they often tend to report higher levels of happiness, higher levels of life satisfaction, and lower levels of negative emotions. So that, those were the main things from the global perspective in the United States. What we found when we can look kind of longitudinally is that over the last 20 years, there’s been really stark increases in dining alone. Um, so the percentage of Americans who report eating all of their meals alone in the previous day has increased by quite a lot, um, by over 50% in just 20 years. And we can see that pretty clearly in the data no matter how we kind of construct these different variables.

That was pretty striking to us, and that’s been true for every age group, but particularly the rises in dining alone have been very stark among younger people. And then finally, we also just look at links between sharing meals and other indicators of social support and loneliness. Uh, and we start to observe some significant correlations there.

So I think overall we, we are showing that this metric of sharing meals or dining alone is actually a really strong indicator of wellbeing and definitely worthy of some, uh, future research and study. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Micah, can I ask you, first of all, why this year did you decide, or did the researchers, you and your colleagues decide to dig into social meals ? And, and also was there any finding that was really surprising or puzzling or just weird to you, something you didn’t expect at all?

Micah Kaats: Yeah, sure. Um, so in terms of why this year, the, the short answer to that is that this new data that came in from Gallup was really the impetus. So, you know, I, I’m a data scientist. We’re empirical happiness researchers. We really do rely on the data that we can work with.

And there was this really exciting new data that was collected by Gallup in a global perspective on how many times people shared meals with others. This was sort of funded and promoted by Aina Moto, which is a, a Japanese, uh, food and beverage company. So just the fact that we had this new data and nobody had analyzed it yet was kind of really the most proximate reason why we wrote the chapter.

But taking a step back, there’s also a…Well, there’s been a lot of research on social connections and their importance for wellbeing. Uh, there’s often been, I think, a fair criticism, or at least a worry, that these variables are often almost by nature, subjective and so kind of hard to compare. They’re hard to compare across different cultures, hard to compare across different people. You know, if I ask you how many close friends do you have, you might have a very different definition of what constitutes a close friend than somebody else. So this can make studying kind of wellbeing and happiness and, and social connections in general really challenging because you have to assess how comparable these measures are.

So we’re sort of always on the lookout for these objective indicators. There’s a, there’s been a lot of work in the world happiness report about lost wallets. So, uh, you know, if you actually, and there’s been some experiments that have been run in a global perspective on if you drop wallets on the street randomly, what percentage of those are likely to be returned to their owners? That’s really objective, really comparable and proves to be a very strong indicator of a lot of measures of social capital across societies. Um, so not only did this new data become available, but it had this really unique promise of, you know, sharing meals.

How many meals did you eat with somebody? That’s, relative to other indicators, pretty objective, pretty easy to report, comparable across different ages and countries over different, different years periods of time. Uh, so this is what was, was really exciting. And I think that’s the initial reason I came on board, uh, to, to write the chapter.

I’ve done some work with, uh, Jan Emmanuel de Neve, who is, uh, co-author on the chapter and, uh, the editor and publisher of the World Happiness Report in the past. And we were just talking about this, this, this new chapter that he was working on using this global data, but what they were really missing was a longitudinal perspective.

So this survey was just conducted in 2022 and 2023, but it’s really hard to look at trends over time. You know, we do, we have this new data from a global perspective, but we don’t know how meal sharing has evolved over time. And I have been kind of looking for an excuse to dive into this American time use survey data. It’s one of the best time use survey data sets in the world. It’s, uh, you know, run, I think by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s really, really reliable. And so I’ve always been kind of looking for ways to, to use this. 

And since this survey does actually ask people what they do on a day-to-day basis and who they’re with, even though it didn’t specifically ask how many meals did you share, we might be able to look at when people report eating, do they report eating alone or with somebody else? So that was what I came on board to try to contribute. And that proved to be more interesting than I thought it was going to be, honestly, starting out. Uh, and we can talk a little bit more about that. 

And in terms of, I think the findings that were most surprising to me, definitely two stood out from the chapter. I mean, one was just how important sharing meals seems to be in explaining people’s wellbeing. So we looked at this empirically and tried to see if we, using this data from 142 countries, there’s a lot of variation in people’s wellbeing. And if we want to try to explain that variation, how do we explain what makes some people happier or less happy than others? We can look at a bunch of different other variables to try to explain that, like to what extent can these differences be explained by income? To what extent can these, uh, differences be explained by employment or, or these other variables?

And what we found was that actually, sharing meals proves to be a stronger indicator of people’s wellbeing. It explains more variation than income and also than unemployment, which to me is just dramatic. I mean, the, the, the, the amount of time and energy and effort that researchers and policy makers spend on analyzing income, statistics and maximizing economic growth and all of this, the fact that, you know, if I want to know how happy you are, it’s more informative to me, for me to know how many meals you shared with somebody in the last week than it is for me to know how much money you make. Um, and that was pretty striking. That, that genuinely did surprise me. 

Uh, and the second thing that surprised me was when we started to look at the American time use survey data, and I actually remember like the first time I saw this, the trend, it’s unmistakable, this very clear increase in dining alone. Um, since 2003, every single year, you know, you’ve seen this steady uptick. And given that this is a relatively objective variable of how many meals did you share with somebody? Uh, in, in this case, it’s in the previous day. That was also really striking. You normally don’t see trends that look this clear in survey data. Uh, and in fact I remember kind of that was the first graph that I tried to produce after cleaning this American time use survey data and, and getting it all prepared. And then I tried to produce that first graph and saw this very clear upward sloping diagonal line.

And I thought, oh no, I, I did something wrong. I must have clearly made a mistake. I, there’s no way that that’s the case. I tried to go back, I applied different survey weights, look at different ways of measuring, uh, sharing meals and dining alone, and we just kept seeing this very sharp diagonal line increase. And that’s just not something that I’m, I’m used to seeing in my research. So that was also pretty striking that we’ve seen this really stark increase in dining alone in the US in particular. 

Bri DeRosa: I would love to dig into that a little bit more, right? Because that, that was also really mind blowing to me when I was reading the chapter and, and looking at the work that you did and you know, I think the easy, sort of, the glib answer that most of us would come up with is like, oh, well it’s the phones, right? Oh, well, you know, the young, the Youngs are spending all of their time on their phones. Your data seems to suggest, no, the phones are not the culprit here. 

Can you talk to us a little bit about what we think might be going on? Do you have a hypothesis about this? 

Micah Kaats: Yeah, I can talk a little bit about it. I mean, I think the short answer is, we don’t know, is, is, is kind of the, the long and short of it. The reason why I think we are a little bit skeptical that smartphones and social media can sort of explain. This is for a few reasons.

I mean, so one, we, we see these increases really from the first year that we have data available, which is in 2003. And you start to see these steady increases all the way back 20 years before smartphones, before social media really were widespread. Um, so it’s one thing that, that, you know, makes us question the extent to which all of this can be blamed on, on smartphones and social media among young people in particular.

You know, some of the starkest increases, uh, have occurred, you know, in like 2018, 2019. Um, so this is even after the proliferation of smartphones and social media, it seems like that might not be a complete explanation. Also, just kind of looking at some of the background research, there have been. I think this fits in with, uh, you know, our work is certainly standing on the shoulders of giants like Robert Putnam, who published a book, Bowling Alone, back in 2000, documenting sort of increases in isolation in America in particular. And that, you know, that was in the 20th century before smartphones and social media anyone even had the idea of.

So I think, you know, all of those give us some kind of indication that really what’s going on here is a little bit deeper and, and, and might, there might be more to it than what can be explained by the rise of smartphones and social media. That’s not to say that, you know, they don’t play a role. In fact, there was just a study that was published I think last week as a working paper by Hunt Alcott and, and a few others looking at, they ran a a, a large scale randomized experiment and actually had people deactivate their social media accounts to see what the effect was on their wellbeing in the weeks leading up to the last election.

And they did find a significant effect, that people who deactivated their Facebook accounts did report higher levels of wellbeing subsequent to that. And that can be quite reliable because it’s a, it was a random, randomized experiment, um, sort of the gold standard among research. But the effect that they document was relatively small. So it, it, they did find a significant effect to people who deactivated social media, did report higher levels of positive, uh, uh, emotions. But, uh, this effect was not so large that you would think it could really explain kind of the increases in, um, in mental illness and depression and, and isolation that, that are often talked about.

So I think all of that gives us a little bit of skepticism that this can really be explained by smartphones and social media in terms of what it can be explained by. Um, I, I really don’t know. I mean, all I can say is that we’ve sort of tried to just keep ruling things out. I mean, another thing that we looked at was maybe the rise in living alone could actually, uh, explain the rise in dining alone in the US.

And while there has been an increase in people who live alone, the rate of the increase in people who dine alone is actually greater for people who live with others. So in other words, people who live alone often do eat more meals alone than people who live with other people. But if you look at the changes over time, the increase in dining alone has actually increased more for people who live with others than people who live by themselves.

Um, so that doesn’t seem to be totally capable of explaining it. We also looked at employment. You know, I think it’s reasonable to imagine that people who are employed are more likely to share meals with other people at the office and so on. And that can explain a little bit of the increase, but still does not explain a lot.

And so right now we’re just, you know, this is the first time that we’ve really reported, as far as I know, this, this increase in dining alone and, and global variation in meal sharing. So I think it’s, it’s really an open question and one that we’re actively now working on to try to explain what accounts for this rise and what accounts for this variation in, in sharing meals and dining alone around the world.

Dr. Anne Fishel: And, and then there’s the pandemic too, which for families showed an increase in dining with others during the, the peak or the first year or two of the pandemic rates really went up.

Micah Kaats: So it, I mean, it’s funny, the pandemic has kind of had, this isn’t the only arena in which it had sort of diverse effects depending on who you were and what your social surroundings were.

So among some people, uh, who are, you know, living with others or living with families in particular, rates of dining alone actually did slightly decrease among people who live alone. Rates of dining alone increased quite a bit among young people. We saw that actually there, there were some increases in, in dining alone around the time of the pandemic.

But again, it sort of doesn’t, you see some upticks, but it seems generally in line with the trend that had been going on over the past, you know, 15 years. And it hasn’t really come down since. I mean, one of our initial thoughts was, oh, well maybe the pandemic, everybody was isolated. That would cause this big increase and then it would decline again and people would start sharing more meals with other people.

And we don’t really see that. I mean, particularly among young people. Uh, you know, it, it just seems to have increased even since the pandemic, which was, which was surprising to us and, and leads us to believe that yeah, while the pandemic certainly did play a role, it can’t really explain these underlying drivers.

It, you know, it still seems to be an issue even since. 

Bri DeRosa: So I, I wanna just pursue this idea of eating alone a little bit, um, if we can, because we actually, first of all, it’s fascinating to me, right? And, and the idea that despite the fact that we’ve come out of this period where, you know, Annie’s research into pandemic habits, found that people who ate together more often during the pandemic, actually wanted to continue eating together more often. And sadly, we’ve sort of seemed to find anecdotally that may not be the case and your research seems to back that up, right? That as things got back to normal, actually sadly, the normal became we’re not eating together again, which, which is confounding and frustrating for us. 

But also we received recently a message from a follower of ours, and this is probably outside your comfort zone, but while we have you, we wanted to get your take on this. So the message reads, “What can I do as a single person? I always eat alone. No one eats together at work. I get together with a friend every few months for brunch, but that’s it. I also had a dad with shift work, but it wasn’t comfortable eating when he was home. Eating together growing up was not ideal. I would eat fast to get away from the table, and it has made me an unhealthy, fast eater to this day. I’m not sure how this,” and, and this meaning eating more meals with others, “would work for me.”

Do you have any advice, and so, I mean, obviously there’s a lot here, right, and and Annie’s perspective as a family therapist I’m sure picks up very quickly on the whole, like it wasn’t really comfortable and safe for me to eat family meals growing up and now I’m like an isolated adult and I’m sure there’s a whole episode we could do on that.

But just from your perspective as a researcher and looking at all of this data and thinking about people eating together less and less frequently, especially single people, do you have any insights from this study that might suggest different ways that people eat together in or outside of the United States, or ways that people structure their social eating that might help boost the happiness factor so this person could potentially get more out of the few shared meals that they’re able to have?

Dr. Anne Fishel: This person and, and apparently millions, I mean–

Bri DeRosa: –Apparently millions, right? Yes. 

Micah Kaats: Yeah, it’s, it’s really, it’s an interesting question. One small finding that came out of the report was that when we look at, uh, the relationship between sharing meals and wellbeing in terms of how many meals shared with others in the past week, we do see a steady increase in wellbeing for every additional meal shared.

It doesn’t, there doesn’t seem to be a threshold or, uh, at which, you know, sharing meals with others stops being important for wellbeing. Except for 14 meals a week. So once we look at the maximum amount of lunches and dinners there, we actually do see a slight decline in people who report sharing all of their meals with other people relative to people who report sharing 13, which I think is somewhat interesting that actually, you know, while sharing meals is important for wellbeing, it also might be important too, have some time for yourself and, and to eat alone occasionally. I certainly don’t want to give the message that, you know, people should be constantly putting themselves out of their comfort zone in order to share meals with other people.

And again, I think you know the fact that it does, you do see this steady increase kind of no matter how many meals you share. One way of interpreting that is that, oh, well you should share as many meals as possible. Another way of interpreting that, though, is that every additional meal shared matters. So even if it’s just one extra meal a week with another person or, or two extra meals a week even, that does make a little difference in your wellbeing.

And in fact, the biggest difference that we see is going from sort of zero meals shared to one meal shared. That’s by far the biggest difference. And then after that, there’s a steady increase. So even just sharing one meal with somebody per week, that can actually make a big difference. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: I just say that that’s sort of my, my clinical message when I work with families.

I don’t like to say to them, well, you know, the research says you should be sharing, you know, five meals a week. I say, how many are you sharing? Maybe you could do one more, or, yeah, you’re not doing any, why don’t you just plan one great Sunday lunch and, um, make that the shared meal of the week. So. I, I really like that, you know, not focusing on a particular number.

Micah Kaats: Yeah. I think, I think that’s really important. And again, yeah, even, even just one extra meal, and especially if you’re going from zero to one, I think can, can really make a big difference. Uh, but what, maybe if I, if I could say, say one other thing. That while we don’t exactly know, and this is sort of what we’re looking into now, is why this relationship between sharing meals and wellbeing is so strong, I think there could be a few things at play and there might actually be ways of kind of getting these benefits elsewhere. 

So I think, you know, the obvious reason why sharing meals might be important for wellbeing is that it’s a good source of social connection, but it’s certainly not the only source of social connection. So if you’re somebody who, uh, you know, does like to eat alone or you just don’t work in an office now, maybe try to look for your social connections in other ways. I often, uh, eat a lot of meals by myself. I tend to work from home, so I cook from home. But, you know, even since working on this chapter, I’ve gone kind of outta my way to schedule more coffee dates with people that maybe I, I don’t, uh, I’m not gonna share lunch because I’m not in an office. I’m cooking my own food, but, you know, I’ll meet somebody for coffee. And try to get, uh, that social connection in sort of a different way.

So I think you can kind of maybe get the social component elsewhere outside of meal times, if that works better for your schedule. And I think also, uh, you know, in addition to just having time with other people, I think there’s something about sharing a meal that, you know, you, you have to kind of take a break from whatever you’re doing in order to share a meal with somebody. It kind of slows you down. You have to actually enjoy your food. We show some evidence in the chapter that people who share meals with others actually enjoy their food more. Um, I don’t think they’re eating better food, necessarily. It just means that they’re more present in the moment and, and, and actually enjoying it more. And so that too, I think you might be able to get, even if you’re not sharing a meal with someone else, but if you actually, you know, take 15 minutes to prepare a lunch as opposed to just put something in the microwave, or take a minute to have a walk after a meal or something like that, that you can actually slow yourself down during the day and get that other benefit that I think people might be getting from sharing meals, which is that it actually gives them, it gives them a break from the day. It gives them some time to be present, focused on something else and come back feeling a little bit refreshed.

So maybe overall to try to get these benefits elsewhere other than just sharing meals with others. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah. That’s great. Can I just jump back a few minutes ago, thinking about some of the cultural differences, because I think one of the findings was that Latin America and Caribbean and the Caribbean had the highest number of average meals, somewhere around 13.

Some of the other countries had fewer, but there was a stronger connection, let’s say in America, Australia, New Zealand, between eating together and wellbeing than there was for the countries that had the higher rates of eating together. Am I getting that right? And if I am, how do you understand that?

Micah Kaats: Yeah, yeah. You are getting that right. This was also really interesting to us is that, you know, you can look at sort of two different dynamics of meal sharing. You can look at how often people share meals with others, and you can look at how important meal sharing is for wellbeing. Um, and I think the, the intuitions actually could cut both directions, right?

You could imagine that in a culture where sharing meals is very common. People actually take it relatively for granted that they would share meals with others. So it’s actually not super important for your wellbeing ’cause it’s just assumed that you’re gonna be sharing meals with other people. On the other hand, you could imagine that, well, maybe in a culture where sharing meals is more rare, it would actually be valued more.

And so in a context in which people don’t often eat meals with each other, then those meals that are shared with other people actually end up being very important for wellbeing. The perspective is that, well, maybe sharing meals would be common because it’s valued. So people do really value sharing meals. It is really important for wellbeing and that’s why it’s so common.

Um, and so I think all of these dynamics could potentially explain this relationship between how often people share meals and how important it is for wellbeing. And when we look around the world, there really doesn’t seem to be a clear story that emerges. So Latin America and the Caribbean has some of the highest rates of meal sharing in the world. Yet, it’s relatively less important there for wellbeing than it is in the United States and the United States and New Zealand and Australia. There are relatively high levels of, of meal sharing, though. It’s not like nobody shares meals with each other, that that doesn’t completely explain that one hypothesis of maybe in a culture where it’s rare, it’s valued more, it actually is somewhat common in, in English speaking countries.

The short answer is we don’t really know yet. My guess is that many of these dynamics could be going on at the same time or overlapping. And this is also a, an area of research that we’re actively involved in now, is looking at this relationship between the frequency of meal sharing and its importance for wellbeing.

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I mean, I, I think for me, like thinking about that, my wondering that comes out is like, gee, you’ve been talking about the social connectedness piece, right? Which is where Annie and I always go with family meals. It’s about the connection. Um, and I do wonder, just the whole fabric of social connection in certain areas of the world, may be stronger or more enmeshed in different ways.

And that could, you know, you could adjust for that. And that also leads to another kind of question about social habits and social connections. And looking at your research, Annie and I noticed that it seemed like there was a gender difference. It seemed to us that women in your study were more impacted negatively by not having meals than men were. So I’m wondering what do you make of that? Is that, does that hold across the data? Is that a real thing that we observed? And you know, what do we think is going on there? 

Micah Kaats: We do. We do see that, that we do see that around the world. This is true across cultures that women do report higher levels of negative affect overall.

And we’re not the first to report this. This has been reported in the World’s Happiness Report before, in last year’s edition. There was a whole chapter on this. It’s often called sort of the Female Happiness Paradox, that women and men often report similar levels of satisfaction with their lives overall, but women report much higher levels of negative affect, and I think the jury’s still out on why that might be.

I think there’s sort of two possible explanations. One is that women might simply be more likely to report experiencing negative emotions than men. So actually they might be having the same amount of negative emotions, but women are just more likely to say that they’re sad or worried or stressed than than men would be.

So it’s one possible explanation. The other possible explanation is that women might actually just simply be more exposed to stressors in their daily lives and cultures and environments than men are, or both of these could be true, I think. I think there’s good evidence on both sides. I don’t think that there’s really a clear consensus in the literature as to, as to what might be going on there.

And I think when you, you know, both of those stories could also kind of apply to meal sharing as well. I think when you look at this difference, and again, we really see this difference for negative affect where, uh, negative emotions in particular, that women report, who dine alone, report much higher negative emotions than women who share meals with others.

And that difference is greater than it is for men as to why this is going on. I think, you know, something like those two explanations I, I laid out before might help to explain it, that maybe women are just more likely to report experiencing negative emotions or maybe really they have a, a greater need for social interaction than men do.

Uh, lack of access to social connections might be more impactful for them, but I don’t think we have a clear answer. So I mean, I’d be really curious to hear what your hypothesis is actually. 

Bri DeRosa: No, I mean, you actually just sort of hit upon it. That is my observation, is that I tend to, I think I get more intrinsic, immediate value from deep social interaction, going out for a meal or coffee with friends or having, you know, a bigger family dinner or whatever with other people.

I tend to get more of a boost from that, I think, than my husband and sons necessarily do. It’s not that they don’t enjoy it. But I don’t see the same kind of trajectory in terms of its immediate impact on them and vice versa. When I’m not getting a lot of that type of interaction, I find myself really feeling a little bit more out of sorts, whereas I find that the three of them are generally – despite personality differences amongst them – generally more able to just kind of roll with it until the next time that they have a, a social interaction again.

Completely anecdotal, but I thought it was an interesting finding in the study because I was like, that actually, yeah, I’ve experienced that. If I don’t have enough time with people, enough meals with people particularly, I get really squirrely. So. You know? 

Micah Kaats: Yeah, no, that, that, that makes a lot of sense. And I, I think, you know, the reason why I, I don’t think we really know for sure is because there is some good evidence on for, for a lot of these explanations.

I think that there is good evidence that women are more likely to report experiencing negative emotions than men, even when we think that they’re probably experiencing similar levels. There is also good evidence to suggest that women might be more sensitive to having or not having social connections and social interactions than men.

Whether that is cultural or socially influenced or genetic or biological influence? Probably all the above. I think you know this, this is why this topic in particular of sharing meals is so fascinating to me, is it’s sort of like a Pandora’s box of many interesting social dynamics and issues in society, all of which might be true at the same time.

Uh, which makes it a really interesting area of research, but also because it’s sort of so novel. I think it’s one that we don’t really have clear, clear answers to yet. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: And then there’s the age factor. I’m thinking about, uh, research on older adults who tend to report less negative affect overall, both men and women.

And I’m wondering whether you looked at retirees or people you know, over 75 and found any difference there across the globe. 

Micah Kaats: Yeah. So it is sort of all around the world. We do see evidence that, uh, well, it, it is true that older people in general do report higher levels of overall satisfaction with their life. Generally higher levels of wellbeing than younger people. Um, there’s often referred to as kind of a U-shape in happiness, where younger people and older people report the highest levels of wellbeing and those in middle age report the lowest. There’s some, uh, new evidence coming out recently that is throwing that into question that actually some of the declines that we’re seeing in young people’s wellbeing might actually be kind of reversing this U-shape, or at least making it more kind of like a straight line that you, you know, get happier and older age, but are not as happy in as a younger adult than you used to be.

Some of that’s pretty concerning, but it seems to be like that, that there might be something to that. In terms of dining alone and sharing meals, it’s also true that, uh, older people in general spend much more time alone than younger people do, and that also carries over into meal sharing. So it is true that, like, across all regions of the world, younger people are much more likely to share meals with others than older people.

Um, but we also find that sharing meals also tends to be kind of more important for wellbeing for younger people than it is for older people. I think, uh, you know, the story here might have something to do with sort of cultural norms and expectations, kind of what we talked a little bit about earlier, you know, if, if everybody around you is sharing meals and you’re not, uh, which might be the case more, more likely to be the case if you’re a younger person than an older person, that not sharing meals with, with somebody might have more of an impact on your wellbeing than if you’re older and the expectation is, well, nobody’s really going to be sharing meals anyway. So if I’m not right now, you know, I’m, I’m, I’m sort of in line with everybody else and it’s not gonna affect you as much. 

There’s been some really one of my favorite, or yeah. Yeah. I could say one of my favorite, uh, findings to come out of Happiness research is that the effect of unemployment on wellbeing, which tends to be one of the largest effects that we often find, that being unemployed really has devastating effects for, for your happiness and wellbeing. But those effects are actually less severe during times of recessions or economic downturns. So if everybody around you is getting laid off, then the effect of being laid off, for your wellbeing, is not as severe as it is if everybody around you has a job and you get laid off or, or let go. So I think that, that, that might also carry over into, into this domain as well. 

Bri DeRosa: There is so much to unpack here.

Like I, oh, I wanna do a whole episode on that, which has nothing to do with family meals, but like, there’s just so much. There’s so much interesting data here, but I think unfortunately we’re, we’re running to the end of our podcast and we probably need to wrap up the conversation. 

So we always, Micah, end our podcasts on our three kind of pillars of family meals. Food, fun, and conversation. And so I’m gonna ask if you would mind kicking us off with food. I’m gonna ask you the question: If you were going to share a meal with someone, if you were going to invite someone to share a meal with you, ideally, what food would you serve? 

Micah Kaats: Sure. So I think I would go for a salad.

I have a few salad recipes that I’m quite proud of. What I also like about salads is they can be, you know, it’s mostly food preparation, so you’re kind of like cutting vegetables or cutting fruit and mixing it together rather than having to stand over a stove and you might be burning things, which tends to be a little bit more relaxing.

You can kind of talk to people while it’s going on. I’ve been, uh, I have a salad recently that’s like an arugula salad with walnut and goat cheese and apple and it’s really good, but you have to mix it really, really well or it doesn’t taste very good. I’ve tried shaking it, but then it’s not as good as if you mix it.

So I like doing that with other people ’cause I put them to work a little bit before they eat. They have to spend a lot of time actually mixing the salad to make it worthwhile. That, that, that would probably be my go-to at this point. 

Bri DeRosa: I love that. I just had an image, Annie, I don’t know if you went to the same place I did. But our community dinners often include, uh, we give kids cream in shakers and we have them have a dance party and shake things really hard until it turns into whipped cream that they can serve for dessert. And I just had this like, wild image of like, you shaking salad with your guests trying to have a salad dance party.

I don’t know. 

Micah Kaats: That’s great. Exactly. Exactly. That’s not far from reality. 

Bri DeRosa: I’m gonna go with the fun and I, you know, I don’t know what could be more fun than a, a salad dance party, but, um, I’ll try. So I think, you know, for fun there are so many things you could do to, to make dinner fun, but I wanna call people’s attention to a few games that we have on the site, a few ideas.

And these are great for, you know, from little, little kids all the way up. So one of my favorite silly things to do, especially with small kids is, um, the cat and cow game where you just say cat and they have to meow and then you say cow and they have to moo and you do it faster and faster and mix it up until somebody messes up, which happens pretty quickly.

And it always makes people laugh because you’re like, me, meow. You can’t, you can’t meow or Moo anymore. So that’s a really fun one. And, and actually my husband and I have done it like on car trips and whatever. You don’t have to be two. So you know, things like that. 

Also, joke contests. You can even, you know, you could have a jar in the middle of the table. Stick your favorite jokes in there, pull ’em out, tell ’em. Tongue twisters are always fun. And then there’s always the try not to laugh challenge, we have this one on the site and you can even, you know, now that we’ve established that phones may not be entirely the source of all evil, but you can even pull out a smartphone to help you with the try not to laugh challenge. You can pull up funny videos or different things, different prompts on the internet to help you with, um, trying not to laugh at something that is inherently really funny and see how, how fast somebody loses the game. So there are all those types of things to make this really fun and enjoyable.

And Annie, I wonder for you, conversation. What conversation starter would you recommend for a really kind of great happiness boosting dinner table discussion? 

Dr. Anne Fishel: So, I’m gonna take a page out of the American time use study that we talked about that looks at the whole day, and I’m gonna. Take some poetic license here, and the question would be, tell me what a fabulous day would look like for you from getting up until going to bed.

And as somebody at the table starts to do that, I and others would ask questions like, what food would you be eating? Who would you be eating it with? What would you be doing? Who would you wanna connect with? So I would also steer the conversation towards connection, knowing that that really is the root of happiness, uh, for most of us.

Bri DeRosa: I love that idea. And I, I think you also, you just learn so much about each other, right? When you ask questions like that, what would a fabulous day include? And, and it’s also, it, you know, maybe you get some great ideas for a different way to connect and, and boost your happiness, you know, something you can do away from the table together.

Micah Kaats: I love that as well. I’ve actually recently been talking to some friends about that exact exercise of, you know, how would you design your perfect day, what would it look like? And not only do you learn a lot about others, but I think you learn a lot about yourself, because really I think at the root of that question is what do you care about?

If you could do anything, you could spend your time doing anything, what would you spend your time doing? Um, which is fascinating to learn about others, but also fascinating to learn about yourself. You might know, know less than than you think you do.

Dr. Anne Fishel: Particularly if you find out you’re not really doing the things that would make up, make a fabulous day.

It can be sort of a, well, maybe I should make more time for those things. 

Micah Kaats: Exactly, exactly. And at least in my case, you know, having gone through that exercise. Uh, what was also surprising was that so many of the things that I want to do are not, they’re actually achievable. They’re actually things that I could do.

It’s not, oh, I want to wake up in a mansion and have seven butlers serve me, you know, grapes or whatever. No, a lot of the things that I wanted to do is like, oh, I could, I could actually do most of those. So, so why, why don’t I?

Bri DeRosa: And I think that’s such a, a great way to put a button on this because if you think about in the realm of things that are achievable, that might boost our happiness, eating with other people is actually pretty, pretty well within our grasp for most of us.

And so I think it’s a great way to remind people, Hey, let’s come back to the beginning of this. Eating together boosts your happiness. Try to do it one more time this week than you have been. Thank you, Micah, for joining us today. And, uh, everybody, we’re gonna be linking to this study and Micah’s work in the show notes.

So if you have, you wanna read it more, you have more questions about it, you can always reach out to us and, uh, we’ll see you next time on The Family Dinner Project Podcast.