skip to main content
10.1145/3395035.3425649acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication Pagesicmi-mlmiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Guess who's coming to dinner? Surveying Digital Commensality During Covid-19 Outbreak

Published: 27 December 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Eating together is one of the most treasured human activities. Its benefits range from improving the taste of food to mitigating the feelings of loneliness. In 2020, many countries have adopted lock-down and social distancing policies, forcing people to stay home,often alone and away from families and friends. Although technology can help connecting those that are physically distant, it is not clear whether eating together, at the same moment via video-call,is effective in creating the sense of connectedness that comes with sharing a meal with a friend or a family member in person. In this work, we report the results of an online survey on remote eating practices during Covid-19 lock-down, exploring the psychological motivations behind remote eating and behind deciding not to. Moreover, we sketch how future technologies could help creating digital commensality experiences

References

[1]
Laurensia Anjani, Terrance Mok, Anthony Tang, Lora Oehlberg, and Goh Wooi Boon. 2020. Why do people watch others eat? An empirical study on the motivations and practices of mukbang viewers. In CHI 2020: Proceedings of the 2020 SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
[2]
Rick Bell and Patricia L Pliner. 2003. Time to eat: the relationship between the number of people eating and meal duration in three lunch settings. Appetite 41, 2 (2003), 215--218.
[3]
France Bellisle and Anne-Marie Dalix. 2001. Cognitive restraint can be offset by distraction, leading to increased meal intake in women. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 74, 2 (2001), 197--200.
[4]
John A Campbell. 2000. User acceptance of videoconferencing: Perceptions of task characteristics and media traits. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE, 10--pp.
[5]
Anthony S Chowand RebeccaACroxton. 2014. Ausability evaluation of academic virtual reference services. College & Research Libraries 75, 3 (2014), 309--361.
[6]
Vanessa I Clendenen, C Peter Herman, and Janet Polivy. 1994. Social facilitation of eating among friends and strangers. Appetite 23, 1 (1994), 1--13.
[7]
Tegan Cruwys, Kirsten E Bevelander, and Roel CJ Hermans. 2015. Social modeling of eating: A review of when and why social influence affects food intake and choice. Appetite 86 (2015), 3--18.
[8]
John M De Castro. 1994. Family and friends produce greater social facilitation of food intake than other companions. Physiology & behavior 56, 3 (1994), 445--455.
[9]
Myrte Esther Hamburg, Catrin Finkenauer, and Carlo Schuengel. 2014. Food for love: the role of food offering in empathic emotion regulation. Frontiers in psychology 5 (2014), 32.
[10]
C Peter Herman. 2017. The social facilitation of eating or the facilitation of social eating? Journal of eating disorders 5, 1 (2017), 16.
[11]
Marion M Hetherington, Annie S Anderson, Geraldine NM Norton, and Lisa Newson. 2006. Situational effects on meal intake: A comparison of eating alone and eating with others. Physiology & behavior 88, 4--5 (2006), 498--505.
[12]
Ata Jami. 2015. Healthy Reflections: The Influence of Mirror Induced Self-Awareness on Taste Perceptions. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research 1, 1 (2015), 2016.
[13]
Brent McFerran, Darren W Dahl, Gavan J Fitzsimons, and Andrea C Morales. 2009. I'll have what she's having: Effects of social influence and body type on the food choices of others. Journal of Consumer Research 36, 6 (2009), 915--929.
[14]
Lisa Miller, Paul Rozin, and Alan Page Fiske. 1998. Food sharing and feeding another person suggest intimacy; two studies of American college students. European Journal of Social Psychology 28, 3 (1998), 423--436.
[15]
Robert A Moody and Regi L Wieland. 2010. Using videoconferencing to establish and maintain a social presence in online learning environments. Educational Considerations 37, 2 (2010), 18--21.
[16]
Radoslaw Niewiadomski, Eleonora Ceccaldi, Gijs Huisman, Gualtiero Volpe, and Maurizio Mancini. 2019. Computational Commensality: from theories to computational models for social food preparation and consumption in HCI. Frontiers in Robotics and AI 6 (2019), 1--19.
[17]
Elinor Ochs and Merav Shohet. 2006. The cultural structuring of mealtime socialization. New directions for child and adolescent development 2006, 111 (2006), 35--49.
[18]
Paul Rozin. 1996. Towards a psychology of food and eating: From motivation to module to model to marker, morality, meaning, and metaphor. Current Directions in Psychological Science 5, 1 (1996), 18--24.
[19]
Sarah-Jeanne Salvy, Marlana Howard, Margaret Read, and Erica Mele. 2009. The presence of friends increases food intake in youth. The American journal of clinical nutrition 90, 2 (2009), 282--287.
[20]
Georg Simmel. 1997. The sociology of the meal.
[21]
Charles Spence. 2017. Comfort food: A review. International journal of gastronomy and food science 9 (2017), 105--109.
[22]
Charles Spence, Maurizio Mancini, and Gijs Huisman. 2019. Digital commensality: Eating and drinking in the company of technology. Frontiers in psychology 10 (2019), 2252.
[23]
Jordan D Troisi, Shira Gabriel, Jaye L Derrick, and Alyssa Geisler. 2015. Threatened belonging and preference for comfort food among the securely attached. Appetite 90 (2015), 58--64.
[24]
Jordan D Troisi and Julian WC Wright. 2017. Comfort food: Nourishing our collective stomachs and our collective minds. Teaching of Psychology 44, 1 (2017), 78--84.
[25]
George Ursachi, Ioana Alexandra Horodnic, and Adriana Zait. 2015. How reliable are measurement scales? External factors with indirect influence on reliability estimators. Procedia Economics and Finance 20 (2015), 679--686.
[26]
Kaitlin Woolley and Ayelet Fishbach. 2017. A recipe for friendship: Similar food consumption promotes trust and cooperation. Journal of Consumer Psychology 27, 1 (2017), 1--10.

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Bridging Distances through Virtual Cook-Along Sessions: Exploring the Design Space of Collaborative Remote Cooking ExperiencesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/37011859:1(1-29)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2025
  • (2024)pic2eat: Facilitating Social Ice-breaking through Collaborative Design of 3D Printed AppetizerExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3651082(1-7)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)More than Foodsaving Machines: Insights from Communities Fighting Food Waste in the Digital AgeInteracting with Computers10.1093/iwc/iwae043Online publication date: 2-Oct-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
ICMI '20 Companion: Companion Publication of the 2020 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction
October 2020
548 pages
ISBN:9781450380027
DOI:10.1145/3395035
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 December 2020

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. commensality
  2. coronavirus
  3. food
  4. remote communication

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

ICMI '20
Sponsor:
ICMI '20: INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MULTIMODAL INTERACTION
October 25 - 29, 2020
Virtual Event, Netherlands

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 453 of 1,080 submissions, 42%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)41
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 08 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Bridging Distances through Virtual Cook-Along Sessions: Exploring the Design Space of Collaborative Remote Cooking ExperiencesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/37011859:1(1-29)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2025
  • (2024)pic2eat: Facilitating Social Ice-breaking through Collaborative Design of 3D Printed AppetizerExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3651082(1-7)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)More than Foodsaving Machines: Insights from Communities Fighting Food Waste in the Digital AgeInteracting with Computers10.1093/iwc/iwae043Online publication date: 2-Oct-2024
  • (2023)A Social Awareness Interface for Helping Immigrants Maintain Connections to Their Families and Cultural Roots: The Case of Venezuelan ImmigrantsProceedings of the 2023 ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences10.1145/3573381.3596461(188-193)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2023
  • (2023)“Missing ingredients: Digital commensality and its challenges in fostering psychological well-being”Food and Foodways10.1080/07409710.2023.226172231:4(319-338)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2023
  • (2023)The Similarity of Virtual Meal of a Co-eating Agent Affects Human ParticipantCollaboration Technologies and Social Computing10.1007/978-3-031-42141-9_8(115-132)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Food‐related experiences and behavioral responses among people affected by chemosensory dysfunctions following COVID‐19: A scoping reviewResearch in Nursing & Health10.1002/nur.2231546:4(385-399)Online publication date: 12-May-2023
  • (2022)Digital Forms of Commensality in the 21st Century: A Scoping ReviewInternational Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health10.3390/ijerph19241673419:24(16734)Online publication date: 13-Dec-2022
  • (2022)What's on your plate? Collecting multimodal data to understand commensal behaviorFrontiers in Psychology10.3389/fpsyg.2022.91100013Online publication date: 30-Sep-2022
  • (2022)Effects of Meal Similarity on Interpersonal Synchronization in Three-Party Remote DiningFrontiers in Computer Science10.3389/fcomp.2022.8382294Online publication date: 22-Jun-2022
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media