• Sharing meals corresponds to higher levels of life satisfaction and positive affect.
• According to the World Happiness Report, it is an indicator of subjective wellbeing, on a par with income and employment.
• Sharing meals could be a policy tool to promote societal wellbeing.

For more than a decade, the World Happiness Report, produced by the wellbeing research centre at the University of Oxford together with the consultancy firm Gallup and the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, has drawn on a series of surveys demonstrating that social connections are important drivers of happiness, both at the individual and national level and across cultures. The 2025 edition presents new evidence on an understudied measure of social connection: sharing meals, an objective practice that is directly and unambiguously comparable across countries and cultures, among individuals, and over time. The report analysed data from 142 countries and territories collected in 2022 and 2023, exploring the links between meal sharing, social relationships and wellbeing — a topic that is not new, but has received little study.

World Happiness Report: global differences in meal sharing

According to the findings, there are stark differences in the frequency of shared meals and solitary meals around the world — differences that are not fully explained by regional or individual characteristics such as income, employment or household size. Latin America and the Caribbean emerge as world leaders in meal sharing, with nine meals eaten with others per week. At the bottom of the list is South Asia, where people report eating fewer than four meals with others per week.

Around the world, sharing meals makes people happy

The study then examined the relationship between life evaluations measured using the Cantril scale and the total number of meals shared with others in the previous week. Overall, a positive relationship between meal sharing and life evaluations is evident. Across all countries, sharing one additional meal per week is associated with an average increase of approximately 0.2 points on a scale from 0 to 10. And this difference is both statistically significant and practically meaningful. A difference of 0.2 points, in fact, is roughly equivalent to a difference of five positions in the global happiness ranking presented in the report.

Meal sharing proves to be an exceptionally strong indicator of subjective wellbeing, on a par with income and unemployment. Those who share more meals with others report significantly higher levels of life satisfaction and positive affect, and lower levels of negative affect. This holds true across all age groups, genders, countries, cultures and regions.

Meal sharing also appears to be closely correlated with some, but not all, measures of social connection. In particular, countries where people share more meals have higher levels of social support and positive reciprocity, and lower levels of loneliness. Eating alone is equally (if not even more) strongly associated with low levels of wellbeing.

The question of causality remains to be explored

Does sharing meals make people happier? Or do happy people share more meals? Or, perhaps more likely, is the relationship bidirectional? At present, it remains unclear whether sharing meals leads to greater wellbeing or whether greater wellbeing leads to more shared meals. According to the researchers, in all likelihood, both propositions are probably true, at least to some extent. Arriving at a complete answer to these questions of causality is a task that remains open to future research.

Meal sharing as a policy tool for societal wellbeing

What is clear, as the report states, is that if meal sharing is important for promoting social bonds and subjective wellbeing — as the evidence in this chapter suggests — it could serve as a unique, valuable, actionable and cost-effective policy tool to facilitate and promote societal wellbeing.

The report cites the example of the Project Gather in the United States, which has already begun charting new paths in this direction by providing financial support for shared meals, in the belief that eating with others can bring joy, forge interpersonal bonds and help address the epidemic of loneliness in the United States: "When we come together with others around food, we nourish not only our bodies, but also our spirits," said Vivek Murthy, the programme's champion and former US Surgeon General, who published Recipes for Connection, a booklet containing various ideas and tips for gathering around the table.