Design to Eat Together

There are many, many benefits of eating with other people. During times of the year when you are mainly dining inside, getting everyone together in one spot to eat might be a challenge—but during times of year like this when it is possible to eat outside, there’re few reasons that you can’t gather everyone up (more specifically, you can gather everyone up you want to assemble—it’s fine to leave out Uncle Abner who’s always looking for an argument, about anything, or Aunt Jo who is not bound by standard social protocols about bathing).

When we eat with people, we form social bonds with them—which makes sense when you consider that in the very earliest of days, we ate with the other members of our primordial band that we hunted and also gathered foodstuffs with.

Needless to say, when we bond to people we also socialize, mingle more pleasantly with them.

If we eat with our coworkers our work as a group improves—which can be handy in many nonwork groups, for example, the people who need to coordinate their efforts to achieve some important goal, like planning a community park or a family vacation. Some research indicates that we may even be more creative if we eat together.

When we eat the same food as others, together with those other people, we also trust each other more and cooperate more with each other, collaborating better, which is hardly ever a bad thing.