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

Index Terms

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

    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)51
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)8
    Reflects downloads up to 25 Dec 2024

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media