We eat more often than ever, and together less. The shared meal is becoming a choice.

Britain has never eaten more often. We graze at our desks, eat on the move, order in at ten, lean on meal-deal habits and set-menu deals — and by most measures the appetite looks healthy. Nine in ten of us still eat in restaurants; the food-to-go market is heading toward nearly £25 billion a year, growing faster than sit-down dining, increasingly the choice of well-paid professionals buying back a little time. We are becoming, in the trade's phrase, multi-daypart eaters: a bit of breakfast here, a grazed lunch there, something later. The single thing quietly thinning out is the part where we all sit down at once.

You feel it before you can measure it. The fixed dinner hour, the moment the day used to turn on, has softened in the same years the working day lost its edges. When work can reach you at any hour and finishes at none, the meal stops being the full stop at the end of the day and becomes one more thing slotted between tasks. Hybrid work was meant to hand us our evenings back. For plenty of households it handed over an evening that never quite begins, and a fridge raided in shifts.

There is no scolding in this. Eating on the hoof is sometimes exactly right, and a convenience meal is as honest an answer to a hard week as a slow Sunday roast. But it is worth naming what the shared table is, because we are starting to lose it by default rather than by decision. The sit-down meal is the oldest unpaid, unproductive, wholly human thing we do: people in one place, at one time, for no reason beyond each other. It is the small daily rehearsal for the question this publication keeps circling — what we do together when there is nothing to produce.

The market data reads it as a behaviour shift. Read it instead as a quiet vote on what the off-hours are for. If the table goes the way of the office lunch hour — dissolved, individualised, grazed — it will not be because anyone judged it didn't matter. It will be because nobody decided that it did.

So decide it. Not every night; that war is lost and was never worth fighting. The meal that survives the dissolving day is simply the one somebody chooses to keep.

At your table: pick one meal this week that everyone turns up to at the same time, and make it a single pot or tray in the middle — a tray of sausages, peppers and halved new potatoes at 200°C for forty minutes does the job — so whoever cooked gets to sit down too. The food matters far less than the showing up.