Manners are an important aspect of social eating in almost all human societies.

Eating practices

Many homes have a separate kitchen room or outside (in the tropics) kitchen area devoted to preparation of meals and food, and many also have a dining room or another designated area for eating. Dishware, silverware, drinkware for eating and cookware and other implements for cooking come in an almost infinite array of forms and sizes. Most societies also have restaurants and food vendors, so that people may eat when away from home, lack the time to prepare food, or wish to use eating as a social occasion. Occasionally, such as at potlucks and food festivals, eating is in fact the primary purpose of the social gathering.

It is an urban legend that eating fast will make you fat. Studies has disproved the theory that the body cannot keep up with the pace of the food going into the digestive tract, and thus will store the food that it cannot process as fats or energy stores. This is unscientific, as all food that enters via the mouth must pass through the entire digestive system and be broken down into simpler, usable forms that the body can make use of. However, since it takes time (up to 30 minutes) for the brain to get a signal from stomach that it is full, eating fast may cause someone to eat more thereby consuming more calories than if they ate slower, leading to weight gain.

Emotional Eating

Emotional eating is “the tendency to eat in response to negative emotions”. Empirical studies have indicated that anxiety leads to decreased food consumption in people with normal weight and increased food consumption in the obese.

Many laboratory studies showed that overweight individuals are more emotionally reactive and are more likely to overeat when distressed than people of normal weight. Furthermore, it was consistently found that obese individuals experience negative emotions more frequently and more intensively than do normal weight personsLowe, M. R., & Fisher, E. B. Jr. (1983). Emotional Reactivity, Emotional Eating, and Obesity: A Naturalistic Study. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 6 (2), 135-149..

The naturalistic study of Lowe and Fisher compared the emotional reactivity and emotional eating of normal and overweight female college students. The study confirmed the tendency of obese individuals to overeat, but these findings applied only to snacks, not to meals. That means that obese individuals did not tend to eat more while having meals – rather, the amount of snacks they ate between meals was greater. One possible explanation that Lowe and Fisher suggest is that obese individuals often eat their meals with others and do not eat more than average due to the reduction of distress because of the presence of other people. Another possible explanation would be that obese individuals do not eat more than the others while having meals due to social desirability. Conversely, snacks are usually eaten alone.