Fresh insights from the World Happiness Report 2025, released today, shows that sharing meals is a strong indicator of subjective wellbeing.
The findings have been published today by Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre, in the annual World Happiness Report, the world’s foremost publication on global happiness, and mark the UN’s International Day of Happiness. The findings are powered by data from the Gallup World Poll, and analysed by some of the world’s leading wellbeing scientists, including Saïd Business School's Professor of Economics and Behavioural Science Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, who acts as the report's editor and is Director of the Wellbeing Research Centre.
For over a decade, the World Happiness Report has shown that social connections are important drivers of happiness, both at the individual and national level, and across cultures.
Jan co-authors Chapter Three on Sharing meals with others: How sharing meals supports happiness and social connections, which shows that sharing meals proves to be an exceptionally strong indicator of subjective wellbeing – on par with income and unemployment. It finds that those who share more meals with others report significantly higher levels of life satisfaction and positive affect, and lower levels of negative affect. This was found to be true across ages, genders, countries, cultures, and regions. Sharing meals with others is strongly linked with wellbeing across all global regions, but the number of people dining alone in the United States has increased 53% over the past two decades.
In this chapter, Jan examines the relationship between sharing meals and wellbeing, using novel data collected on a global scale, presenting evidence from the first-ever global dataset on social eating, collected in 2022 as part of the Ajinomoto module on the Gallup World Poll. In 2023, Gallup asked these questions again in 17 countries. More than 150,000 people from around the world answered the following two questions: 'Thinking about the last 7 days … (i) On how many days did you eat lunch with someone you know? (ii) On how many days did you eat dinner with someone you know?'. In addition to this new dataset, new evidence is used from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) in the United States on the association between sharing meals, social connections, and wellbeing over time.
