Eating alone isn’t strange anymore

You can see a lot of people eating alone these days. However, in Korea it has been a very important virtue to be together all the time; no doubt, still a number of people cannot eat alone if they aren’t at home.

Why can we see so many people eating alone? I guess people these days need to be pretty individualistic. Also, people are very busy.

By reflecting on this trend, many restaurants for people eating alone have opened nationwide. You can sit individually, not sitting with someone or looking at each other. Also, Cook-bang programs have heated up in Korea. Cook-bang is a neologism adding ‘cook’ and ‘bang’ which means program. Cook-bang has been developing for some years. There are some reasons why Cook-bang is popular in Korea.

Cooking and eating are immensely social behaviors. We share love and friendship by eating together. However, it is not easy to cook for someone and have a meal with other people due to increase of communication by electronic media. Therefore, people feel emotional, psychological hunger.

In the case of Baek Ju-bu in ‘My little television’, he cooks with very simple recipes so that many people can use them in real life. In addition, after he cooks, he shows it to the audience. He constantly talks to the camera and it comforts loneliness.

We care about what people think too much. Therefore, lots of people still can’t eat alone. They don’t even have meals if there aren’t friends they can be with. Isn’t that stranger?

By Seo Su-jin, editor-in-chief  cg0314@naver.com

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