La Penumbra del Duelo

The strangest thing about working at the hospital in 2024 was how no one ate together. It’s virtually the same today, but still feels so jarring. I’ve had a pause from corporate-esque lunch time for more than a dozen years, but in those times, dining together was the best part of the day. Bring lunch, buy lunch, go as a gaggle to the cafeteria. But in the hazy era of… whatever this is… the pocket genie, the tiny computer you rub with your thumb to engage you in 29 minutes of distraction, people seem to mostly dine alone at individual tables with earbuds. Those whose labor keeps them desk bound might lace up shoes, apply ear buds, and circle the perimeter to get sun and steps, but many sit in communal isolation.

The pandemic may have endemic-ed itself, but the social distance seems to remain.

It’s profoundly strange to me, this practice of solitary eating. In my home of origin we ate together, always, until my attendance in junior high school required me to rise before an hour anyone else deemed reasonable. Then I had my coffee and cereal in the company of a quiet house and read the cereal box or skimmed whatever magazine or sales flier was close at hand.

If you’ve been here for awhile you know I’ve written about this lunch situation before - I considered setting out a table tent that said “come eat with me I’m friendly!” (but still haven’t). I have found a few friends who I can sit with, or maybe chat for a moment in passing, and it was a conversation with one recently which jelled some of this thinking (and birthed the title of this piece).

Solitude is medicine, and isolation poison, and maybe my perception of the separation of my solitary colleagues posted up single file at four-top tables is mistaken.

Inside, one regular obviously reads books, printed on paper. Outdoors, one clearly watches scripturely YouTube lectures or sermons, as she does so without earbuds. Others are more private, and strangely transfixed not in voice or chat-based dialogue, but tucked into individual barrels riding an endless scrolling waterfall.

Our most common shared time is now in the staff elevator where we all wait 15 seconds for the door to close unless someone correctly guesses which button arrests the pause and launches us early. It’s not long enough for a phone check, but it’s too short for silence.

These sacred moments have offered me the anthropologist’s favorite brand of encounter in the land of elevators - opportunities to witness and then possibly question subjects in their natural environments, but only long enough for a cultural haiku to volley.

“What were you reading at lunch? Anything you’d recommend?”

Feels both safe enough to answer and easy enough to lie in response to.

Most often I get a generic response - the platform, or sometimes the show or influencer.

One told me she prefers to seek the counsel of a particular AI chatbot, as it wants nothing like conversation back from her. It asks good questions. And liberates her from the insufferable malady of privilege that so many of us face daily - what to have for dinner.

(Literally wrote a book about this, but also if you’re pressed for time, the answer is Chipotle).

She has the same tired conversation she used to have with her dwelling mates, but has fewer kerfuffles about it. The bot helps her to decide, based on her goals and tastes, the aisles at her local grocery, what she has at home, and what she’s eaten for lunch. It also (freakishly) remembers how long it’s been since she had pulled pork and knows she’s trying to lower her HbA1C by May.

She stepped out, following me rather than heading further up to her own office and told me with some direct urgency. The Bot wasn’t perfect; it once fed her a recipe using pasta rinse water, except the recipe contained no pasta.

A chink in the perfect armor is a problem I’ve never faced, and a succinct reminder that the bot is not crowd sourcing, but amalgamating its best deliverable as an entity that has never tasted food, built muscle, or experienced the healing power of dining in community.

I relate so much in the context of emotional weather patterns that don’t offer opportunity for inborn creativity and instead leverage unusual combinations of exhaustion and macros. I am simultaneously grateful for food and overburdened with the responsibility to decide.

Lonely, to me, tastes like eating alone.

La penumbra del duelo.

It means the fog of grief. Not my small grief, but also that. Our big, shared grief that keeps us from noticing the potential for human connection only six feet away.

And this - this - is the thing, I think, that feels most urgent to me in a time when we’re saturated with travesty and drivel. Not that we eat perfectly by some metric of nutrition or efficiency of time or cost. Not that we eat based on some prescribed system derived from modern biochemistry or biohackery, but that we eat together. That we navigate the awkward social frazzle of disagreeing, that we endure overcooked pasta, that we grouse at who spearheads the cleanup duty.

Anyway, those are my 82 cents on the matter.

Thanks for reading,

K