“Pooh! De Gompany! I Am De Gompany!”

Yet despite unwanted attention and decades of articles depicting eating alone as some frightful activity, women have long cherished a solitary meal. M.F.K. Fisher could wax poetic about its pleasures. Fellow food writer Marion Cunningham, a champion of family mealtime, wrote in her popular “Supper Book” that “sometimes eating supper alone feels private, quiet, and blessedly liberating.” In 2017, The New York Times asked the humorist Fran Lebowitz which three writers she would invite to a literary dinner party. “None,” she replied. “My idea of a great literary dinner party is Fran, eating alone, reading a book.”

“I was often alone, but seldom lonely,” he wrote in “Between Meals,” his memoir of his days in Paris, “I enjoyed the newspapers and books that were my usual companions at the table, the exchanges with waiters.”

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