The idea of “aliens that treat eating as a private activity” is …surprisingly hard to explain in actual reasoning

Not just Project Hail Mary, this is a concept that’s come up in a bunch of other fiction before

(honestly so is a lot of what’s in PHM. it’s great to see fans getting excited about a friendship story with an alien that’s actually significantly different from humans, for once…. and getting to experience all the cool brainstorming about “hey what if the aliens actually do something different, instead of this familiar thing I’ve always assumed was universal?”… but it’s saddening that for many of them, this is clearly the very first time they’ve been exposed to that concept. because it’s the first time they’ve seen anything this unfamiliar in a popular movie.) (Or in a book by an author so famous that it had a movie deal while it was still being written.) (neeeed to figure out how to broaden more people’s horizons to include less famous books. but that’s a whole other rant.)

Anyway I’m gonna focus on the “private eating” thing. It’s also appeared at least once on Star Trek Enterprise. And before that, it was one of the first things that I personally made up, independently, at maybe age 15, with very little experience of science fiction outside Star Trek, when I was getting tired of too many culturally similar aliens and wanted to brainstorm things they might have taboos about that humans don’t. It is pretty much the obvious one.

But how would it be explained, in terms of historical origins?

So when I try and think about the things we humans have taboos about doing in public, it’s basically:

Bathroom stuff. We don’t like to shit near other people, because our shit is a pretty big avenue for spreading disease, and it’s not a good idea to socialize around activities that can spread disease that easily.

Sex. This can also transmit certain illnesses, but the risks are probably about comparable to the risks of eating food together. It can also carry a risk of pregnancy (depending on which acts you do) and, if the society cares a whole lot about biological parentage, then that can cause taboos about sex outside monogamous marriage. Additionally, sex can be very emotionally traumatizing if the right rules aren’t followed about consent and respect, more so than most other activities (though the relationship between that and the taboos around sex may be something of a chicken-and-egg question).

Cultural expectations about both these things exist across many human cultures, but humans across the board, as far as I know, are much more likely to treat shit as a private thing than sex.

And none of them, to my knowledge, treat food as private.

The only Earth species I can think of that do prefer to eat in private are solitary species. The ones who do pretty much everything alone unless it absolutely requires someone else. If you’re a lone hunter by nature, of course you take your food into a safe, private place to eat, once you’ve caught it. That’s how you stop anyone else from stealing your damn food.

But social species share food. That’s, like, a huge part of the reason for being a social species.

And pretty much every alien who’s ever been treated as an actual character in science fiction is from a social species. The challenges of doing it any other way are… beyond what most creatives would attempt. (Solitary beings could probably be intelligent, in ways that humans would recognize as intelligence– we consider octopuses very smart and they are solitary! But what other psychological traits would be different? How would you write someone from a solitary species interacting with other characters? Would they have any ability to learn a language? To what degree can they imagine the thoughts of others? What sort of concept of ethics could they have? It’s difficult even to imagine. And most people, like I said, are still taking baby steps toward imagining aliens doing even some of the little stuff differently.)

So. What reason could a social species have, for a taboo against social eating?

I would probably imagine it being societally constructed in similar ways to the various human taboos around sex. That is, there isn’t a strong evolutionary reason for it, and it’s even a little counterproductive when it comes to social bonding, but society has developed in a way that gives some incentive to have that taboo, and not too many obstacles to the logistics of having it.

By not too many obstacles to the logistics, I mean: society has gotten to the point where individuals can benefit from the social unit as a group that does the teamwork of getting and providing food (hunting, agriculture, distribution), without having to make a social event out of consuming the food immediately after.

Meaning, individuals have access to private places and times to eat, and there are good ways to preserve and store the food until it can be eaten at those times and places.

Really… human society is pretty much at this point, now. If we had a strong enough societal incentive to develop privacy taboos about eating, we could totally do it.

And, in my own ideal world, this is exactly where we should have gone, immediately after it became clear COVID wasn’t going away. Or, even more ideally, before it got to that point.

But, alas, by this time in our history, eating is far too deeply entrenched as a social activity. And so, until further technology intervenes, we are doomed to make every social gathering a potential superspreader event, because you can’t mandate masks when the whole damn thing is organized around sharing food.

Now, just what would that taboo look like? Obviously if we’re still going to reap the benefits of producing food via teamwork, the taboo must apply only to the eating. How would cooking be viewed? Or farming, or hunting, or driving a food delivery truck, or working in a grocery store?

Would these be somewhat unsavory jobs, recognized as necessary but socially stigmatized? Would they be like plumbing and sewer maintenance, or like working in a sex toy shop, or like being a gynecologist or urologist? Would people talk about them openly?

And, if those jobs had catastrophic sanitation scandals like some of the ones actually happening today, leading to food poisoning among people eating in their private rooms all over the world – would the coverage be similar?

Or would the customers who suffer the food poisoning bear a much bigger share of the blame? because they’re assumed to have been eating carelessly, disregarding cleanliness, perhaps even eating promiscuously with lots of other people! Would food poisoning now bear the same stigma as sexually transmitted diseases?

Yeah probably.

Anyway, this is how worldbuilding thoughts always spiral outta control in my brain. More than they do in the brains of the authors who wrote most of the fiction I read and watch. Which is why my fanfic always has LORE before it gets to the sexytimes.

Or the foodytimes.