The sad state of America’s dinnertime

Domino’s is finally launching a truly personal pizza. Yay! Right? Except that the company’s announcement about it is weirdly sad. Hungry diners will be able to customize “without compromise,” it says, avoid “sacrifice,” and share a meal without actually sharing. Of course, pizza’s not that deep, but that’s sort of the point. We should generally be able to come to an agreement on olives and pepperoni.

A growing number of Americans are eating by themselves — the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey shows that as of 2023, over a quarter of Americans spent most of their eating and drinking time alone, up from a fifth in 2008. When people do end up gathering for meals, they’re increasingly siloed. We’ve figured out how to eat alone even when we are together.

Food hall-inspired startup Wonder makes meals from multiple menus out of the same kitchen, so no one has to choose between cuisines. Delivery company DoorDash has launched a feature for business customers that lets employees choose separate lunches from different places and get them delivered all at once. A 2026 OpenTable survey found that 52% of Americans say they’d rather order their own dish than share with the table, even as group dining overall is up.

We may be sharing space, but we’re not sharing food — and, in turn, we’re not sharing all the benefits that come with a communal plate.

“The act of coordinating itself makes people have trust and connection,” says Kaitlin Woolley, a professor of management at Cornell University. “Sometimes, this little bit of friction or this little challenge, it does help us to come together.”

Woolley means what she says quite literally. In one of her studies, she paired people off and had them either share a bowl of chips and salsa or each get their own. She then put them in a negotiation scenario, in which one person played management and the other a union representative, and asked them to reach a wage agreement. Her findings: Pairs who shared a snack struck a deal faster than those who didn’t. The slight inconvenience of timing chip dipping and trying not to hog helped the partners forge an understanding.

Sharing a meal often involves a series of mundane accommodations — choosing the restaurant, waiting until everyone has food before starting, not eating too fast, leaving the last cookie on the tray until someone finally relents and takes it. None of this behavior is particularly profound, but it makes us pay a little more attention to others’ wants and actions.

When people order from the same venue or eat the same cuisine, the collective experience improves. That comes at the small expense of everyone not getting precisely what they would have chosen were they on their own, says Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago. “There’s a lot to gain from the social side, and the individual cost is usually negligible,” she says.

Sharing a meal often involves a series of mundane accommodations.

We tend to bond over similarities related to food as well, Woolley adds: “More so than taste in music or similar clothes, it seemed to be a way for people to connect.”

This isn’t always as simple as everyone agreeing on the same cheese pizza and moving on. Many people have food allergies or dietary restrictions, and the option to personalize things makes it easier to participate, even if it comes with its own set of challenges. Instead of getting veto power, the person with the issue can do their own thing and still hang out.

It can be stressful to be the odd one out, and research shows that people with food restrictions tend to worry about how they’ll be perceived. They get anxious about having to reveal their restrictions, wonder whether people will decline to invite them in the future, and feel self-conscious about others making negative assumptions about them.

Kevin Kniffin, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Cornell University, did a study about a decade ago that found that firefighters who eat meals together perform better as a group than teams who eat alone. One of the firefighters in the study was vegan. He would bring his own meal, but still made sure to eat at the same time and at the same table as everyone else. He also took part in shared clean-up chores, despite not contributing to the shared mess.

“The firefighter seemingly had a strong intuition that all of those shoulder-to-shoulder and face-to-face activities were important, and it was his smart way of matching his own dietary decisions with his platoon’s meal-sharing practices,” Kniffin says. He adjusted the part of the meal he needed to without opting out of everything around it.

To be sure, people share meals without eating the same food all the time — i.e., we often order separate dishes at restaurants. Eating distinct items together doesn’t erase social interaction. A lot of the dynamics depend on expectations. If everyone agrees to bring their own lunch to the breakroom, that can strengthen bonds. But if someone invites friends over with the express purpose of cooking a homemade meal and a guest decides to DoorDash their own food instead, that’s a no-no, even if the host might not openly show offense.

“There are silent social agreements,” says Nicklas Neuman, an associate professor and senior lecturer in food studies, nutrition, and dietetics at Uppsala University.

The idea that everyone should get exactly what they want is a modern luxury. It’s a “radical” development in human history to choose what we eat based on taste preference rather than what’s available to us, Neuman says. “It’s obviously also connected to how individualized the culture is,” he says.

Meals aren’t just about nutrition, taste, or social gatherings — they’re also a consumer choice. What we eat says something about who we are, what we value, what we can afford, and where we are in the class hierarchy.

Delivery apps and the ability to get hyper-customized meals have unbundled the constellation of decisions and activities typically involved in communal eating, Kniffin says. In terms of the consequences, he compares the effects to Jenga: It’s not clear “which pieces in the bundle are critical” to actually providing the societal benefits of a shared meal. Maybe the shared entrée isn’t load-bearing, but if you remove too many other blocks, the whole thing collapses, and what remains is a handful of people consuming individualized products around the same time, staring at their phones.

Apart from food selection, other parts of the shared meal are turning into atomized interactions as well. Technology has enabled the precise division of the bill. A multi-person lunch or dinner has long created opportunities for low-stakes financial tensions. Do we split it evenly? Does the person who skipped drinks pay less? Does anyone really want to decipher who ate how much of the appetizer?

Everyone choosing their own specific adventure may lead to a trade-off between long-term social connection and short-term convenience.

Apps such as Zelle, Splitwise, and Venmo make it possible to settle those questions with strict accuracy. That may ease potential conflicts, says Margaret Clark, a professor of psychology at Yale University. When one friend starts calculating everyone’s share down to the last cent, “it just feels petty,” she says. If, instead, the app automatically does the arithmetic, it may feel less loaded. “It’s not the person, it’s not one of the members, who is suggesting that we should be transactional to the last cent,” she says.

Friction at mealtime isn’t inherently virtuous, nor is removing it necessarily antisocial. Sometimes, technology and optionality clear away annoying logistics and make it easier to be together. Other times, the thing being engineered away has value — taking turns, making accommodations, finding compromise. Everyone choosing their own specific adventure may lead to a trade-off between long-term social connection and short-term convenience. There’s something to approaching meals in a more joint, straightforward way — we eat the same thing, generally guess how the money should shake out, or you say you’ll get me next time when I pay — that might make the relationship better.

Maybe instead of five people ordering five individual pizzas and going with Domino’s “without compromise” approach, most of the group agrees to get a large cheese. The person who really wanted sausage learns to live without it for a meal, and the person with an allergy gets a separate small pie with a gluten-free crust. Everyone tackles their slices around the table and discusses whether it might be better to do Chinese or Mexican next time.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.