When 58,051 women and 41,676 men were followed for about 25 years, the ones who ate 11 to 14 home-made lunches and dinners a week turned out to have a 14% lower risk of type 2 diabetes than the ones who ate six or fewer. Part of the difference came from putting on less weight over the years. No special diet was involved. They ate food that someone had made at home.
When we live alone, that someone is us. And this is where it gets hard. Cooking for a family feels like a job worth doing. Cooking for one can feel like a fuss over nothing: the packs are sized for four, the recipes serve six, the leftovers sit in the fridge until we feel guilty about them, and the delivery app is always open on the phone. It never asks how our day was, either. Somewhere along the way we start to believe that a meal for one person is not worth the trouble, and learning how to cook for one feels like a skill for somebody else.
Judith Jones would have disagreed. She was the editor who pulled The Diary of a Young Girl from a pile of rejected manuscripts, and who championed Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking after another publisher had turned it down. Her husband died in 1996, and after decades of cooking for two she was cooking for one. In 2009, at 85, she published a book about it: The Pleasures of Cooking for One. Pleasures, not problems.
Every meal we prepare for ourselves is an investment, and it is one of the easiest we will ever make.
Why it is worth it
The diabetes figures are not alone. In 11,396 adults in England, The Cooking Skills That Keep Your Family Healthy and Safe, linked below, has what happened with home-cooked meals more than five times a week: more vegetables on the plate, more vitamin C in the blood, and a 28% lower chance of being overweight than for people who managed fewer than three. How to Detox From Processed Foods has the other half, from more than 9,500 American adults: homes that cooked dinner six or seven nights a week ate fewer calories, less sugar and less fat than homes that cooked once a week or less.
The longest view comes from Taiwan. When 1,888 people aged 65 and over were followed for ten years, those who cooked more than five times a week had a 41% lower risk of dying than those who never cooked, even after their physical and mental health were taken into account, and the women gained more than the men. The keen cooks also walked and shopped more, so the cooking was part of a more active life rather than the whole story. That is rather the point: the person who cooks is a person who goes out for the ingredients.
None of this needs elaborate food. Simple, nourishing food made with care beats a complicated dish that stresses us out, and it beats anything that arrives in a plastic tray. Good enough, made tonight, is better than perfect, made never. The bar is a plate of something warm that we made ourselves.
The table for one
Eating alone is not the problem in itself. How the meal goes is.
Among 8,988 Korean adults, men who ate dinner alone, or lunch and dinner alone, had about one and a half times the odds of metabolic syndrome, the cluster of a large waist, high blood sugar, high blood pressure and unhealthy blood fats, compared with men who shared those meals. Women who ate breakfast alone had lower odds, not higher. The same habit went in opposite directions depending on who was eating and which meal it was, which is a good sign that the solitude matters less than what happens around it: the meal eaten standing at the counter, in front of a screen, out of the packet.
Korea, where those figures come from, also invented a strange answer to the lonely dinner. Mukbang, from the Korean words for eating and broadcasting, began online in 2009: a host eats a meal on camera while viewers chat along. When more than 100,000 such videos posted between 2017 and 2019 were analysed, easing the loneliness of eating alone came out as what may be the main reason for their popularity. Company on a screen is better than none, but it is still a screen.
Japan took the opposite view. In The Solitary Gourmet, a manga by Masayuki Kusumi and Jiro Taniguchi that has run as a TV drama since 2012, a salesman travels the country and eats alone in real restaurants, and every episode is about the pleasure of it: the menu, the first bite, the quiet satisfaction of a good meal with only himself for company. Eating alone, there, is not a sentence. It is a treat.
Writers have known it for a long time. In Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant (2007), 26 of them, Nora Ephron, Marcella Hazan and Ann Patchett among them, wrote about cooking for one and dining alone, and about the secret meals they make for themselves when no one else is looking, like a truffled egg sandwich.
So give the meal some ceremony. Use a real plate. Sit at the table. Light a candle if you like it, and put on music if you like that too. There is no one here to tell us the candle is silly.
The Hidden Power in Every Bite: Why Some Foods Fill You Up has why the screen matters: eating in front of one made people eat more at that meal and more again later, because a meal we barely noticed is a meal we barely remember. The Hidden Ingredient That Changes Every Meal You Cook, linked below, has the young women who ate the same lunch with and without the TV, and what food that reminds us of being cared for does when we eat alone.
The meal we cook for ourselves deserves the care we would give a meal for someone we love. In a way, it is exactly that.
And now and then, set two places. In a national survey in the UK, people who ate with others more often were happier, more satisfied with life and more trusting, and had more friends they could count on, and the analysis pointed from the shared meals to the closeness rather than the other way round. The evenings that brought people closest had more people at the table, more laughter and more reminiscing. Cooking for one makes cooking for two easy: the same tray, one more chicken thigh, and a friend or a neighbour across the table.
Fewer decisions
When we cook only for ourselves, every meal becomes a fresh decision: what, when, how much. By the end of a long day, the tired brain grabs whatever needs no decision at all. The answer is to make the decisions earlier, once, so that the evening only has to follow them.
Make one plan in if-then form. "If I get home late, I make an omelette." "If there is chicken in the fridge, it goes in the oven as soon as I walk in." Why Motivation Fails — and What Keeps Habits Going After It Does has why plans like these work, and why one at a time works better than five.
Keep a handful of templates. A template is a meal shape that takes whatever is in the fridge. Eggs come first, because they are the fastest proper meal there is: an omelette or a frittata with whatever vegetables need using up, and cheese if you like it. A tray of chicken thighs, sausages or a salmon fillet roasted with a few vegetables, all done at the same time, one tray to wash. A pan of minced beef or lamb, browned with onion and seasoning, eaten tonight and again tomorrow. A pot of soup or stew made on the bone, which only gets better by the second day. Keep oily fish on the list too, a salmon fillet, a mackerel, a tin of sardines: among 1,011 Japanese people aged 65 and over, eating alone by itself was not clearly linked to psychological distress, but eating alone on the least omega-3 went with about twice the odds of it, compared with eating in company on the most. Some of the best meals are the ones we had no plan for an hour earlier.
Rotate the seasoning, not the meal. The same roast chicken tastes different with lemon and garlic, with smoked paprika, or with fresh herbs. Small changes make a repeat feel like a new dinner.
Shopping and storing for one
Shopping for one is easier when we shop smaller and more often, and when the freezer does half the work.
Buy the cheap good food. 10 Practical Strategies to Overcome Barriers to a Healthy Lifestyle has where the money goes: the healthiest diets cost about $1.48 a day more than the least healthy, the gap sits in meat and protein, and eggs, mince, chicken thighs, whole chickens, tinned fish and liver are the good choices that cost least.
Buy for the freezer. Ask the butcher for single portions, or split a family pack as soon as you get home: one chop, one steak or a portion of mince per bag, pressed flat so it freezes quickly and thaws in minutes. Fast matters. Clarence Birdseye learned it in Labrador between 1912 and 1915, watching Inuit fishermen freeze freshly caught fish in the Arctic cold and noticing how well it kept its texture and taste; faster freezing makes smaller ice crystals, which damage the food less. Wrap each portion airtight, because freezer burn is air reaching the food, and keep the freezer at −18°C (0°F) or colder. A few portions of fish freeze just as well.
Freeze what goes stale. Bread freezes well in slices, so one loaf lasts a month and we take out only what we need. Nuts and seeds keep longer in the fridge, where their oils go rancid more slowly.
Keep a short, strong pantry. A good olive oil, such as , an unrefined salt, such as , pepper, garlic, lemons and a few spices turn plain meat, fish and eggs into something worth sitting down for.
Cook once, eat three times
Cooking for one is not cooking small. It is cooking once and eating more than once.
Roast a whole chicken, and put it in the tin without rinsing it first. Good Hygiene: The Everyday Habits That Matter Most has why: cooking kills its bacteria anyway, and rinsing only splashes them across the sink and the draining board. The first night it is roast chicken with whatever vegetables share the tin. The next day the leftover meat goes into an omelette, a salad or a quick stir-fry. Then the carcass goes into a pot with water, an onion and a bay leaf, and simmers into a broth that becomes soup later in the week. One bird, three meals, and almost nothing thrown away. Our grandmothers would have called this ordinary.
The same idea works for a joint of pork or lamb, a tray of meatballs or a pot of stew. The trick is to plan the second meal while making the first, so that the leftovers are ingredients rather than reproaches.
Leftovers, safely
Leftovers are the solo cook's best friend, as long as they are handled well.
Good Hygiene has the fridge rule too: keep the fridge at 5°C, about 40°F, or colder, and get leftovers into it within a couple of hours of cooking, because bacteria multiply fastest in food left out at room temperature. Portion them into containers while they are still warm, and they will cool faster.
Rice needs extra care. Cooked rice can carry the spores of a bacterium, Bacillus cereus, that survive cooking. If the rice cools slowly or sits around, the spores wake up and make a toxin, and that toxin is not destroyed by reheating: it survives 121°C for an hour and a half. The result is nausea and vomiting within one to five hours. So the old bowl of rice from earlier in the week is not a quick dinner. Cool cooked rice quickly, keep it cold, and when in doubt, leave it out. Rice is cheap. A day of being sick is not.
The right-sized kit
We do not need a kitchen built for a family of five. We need a few things the right size.
A small frying pan for eggs and a single steak. One roasting tray. A small pot for soup and broth. A sharp knife and a board, because blunt knives make chopping slow and slow chopping makes takeaway tempting. A good knife is the cheapest takeaway deterrent there is. And containers that go from the fridge to the freezer, such as , so that tonight's extra portion becomes a ready meal for a busy evening.
The Cooking Skills That Keep Your Family Healthy and Safe has the skills that make all of this faster: getting everything ready before the heat goes on, using a thermometer instead of guesswork, and the eggs that give nearly twice the protein cooked as raw.
A table for one, tonight
Judith Jones did not stop cooking well when there was only one person to cook for. She wrote a book about the pleasure of it. Eleven to fourteen home-made meals a week sounds like a lot until we notice that it is mostly lunch and dinner, made without fuss, and eaten sitting down.
The person who takes the trouble to feed themselves well is telling themselves something every evening: you are worth the effort.
Tonight, make one real meal and eat it at the table, with the phone in another room.
Want the skills that make it quicker? The Cooking Skills That Keep Your Family Healthy and Safe — getting everything ready before the heat goes on, the thermometer that settles the guessing, and the safe way with chicken and eggs.
Missing the company at the table? The Hidden Ingredient That Changes Every Meal You Cook — what food does for connection, and why a meal we pay attention to does more for us.
Know someone who eats standing at the kitchen counter most nights? Send them this. A meal for one deserves a plate and a chair.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own health or diet, talk to a qualified health professional.
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