Consuming food all by oneself is an anomaly in the history of human civilization, a deviation from millennia of tradition. And more and more Americans are doing it.

In 1950, sociologist David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd posited that a strong sense of conformity in America was replacing genuine human connection with a performance of group belonging. Avid consumers of mass culture, we had become primarily motivated by a desire to fit in. By blending into the crowd, he argued, we were all hiding from each other in plain sight.

Fifty years later, that seemed like a quaint problem to have. From churches to clubs to labor unions, as political scientist Robert Putnam argued in his landmark 2000 book, Bowling Alone, our civic infrastructure had disintegrated. The once-conformist crowds had disper

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