Issue #91: Cooking for one is a power move – just ask Waitrose

Finally, an advertising campaign that champions eating alone.

Four years ago, I sat down at my kitchen table, poured myself a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon and ate a home-cooked steak dinner. I was celebrating the book deal I’d secured to write Alonement, a memoir meets manual championing the joy of time spent alone. Granted, this was lockdown and I was a household-of-one, so I didn’t have the option of company – but it was nonetheless a particularly fitting way to mark the moment.

Earlier this week, while standing at the platform at my local Tube station, I saw a lookalike scene reflected in the billboard ahead of me. In the Saatchi & Saatchi-designed advertising campaign, launched to promote Waitrose & Partners’ No.1 campaign, a brunette woman enjoys a candlelit steak and wine dinner at a table set for one. ‘No. 1 always comes first’, reads the slogan, while the product promoted – the No.1 Wagyu Sirloin Steak – is a rare example of a supermarket cut of meat, or indeed a cut of anything, sold in a single portion.

I’d never seen anything like this campaign. Racking my brain for a comparison, all I came up with was the 2008 Galaxy advert, where a lone woman in a darkened room nibbles at a chocolate bar – a bar she’s hidden in a box somewhere, so that her cohabitants can’t eat it. The messaging, at least for me, was that enjoying food was something that had to be done covertly, a stolen moment in the dead of night. ‘Think hiding it, think Galaxy’ – goes the slogan.

A very different aesthetic, then, to see a woman eating a meal alone, aware that others are watching but invested in her own pleasure. Better still, it’s not a foil-wrapped ‘treat’, but a home-cooked, balanced meal she’s put time and effort in preparing just for her (and yes, an elevated ready meal is allowed to count here). That’s a powerful thing to normalise. Especially for women, who – even in the 21st century – still end up doing the bulk of household cooking, when living with others.

In the time since I published Alonement, solo travel has boomed – as has solo dining at restaurants, according to the most recent figures from OpenTable (I covered this rise for The Independent earlier this year). And I’m glad that travel operators and restaurants have catered for this shift. But these are one-off, or infrequent, experiences, and expensive ones at that.

For that reason, this is a new frontier. Because cooking for one (and yes, preparing a premium ready meal does count) is radical in a different way. It’s more readily accessible – both financially and logistically – than a meal out or a holiday. If you subscribe to the Stoic philosophy that we are the sum are what we repeatedly do (and I do), then preparing and enjoying a meal for one is an effective love letter to oneself.