Alone at the Table: Food Behavior and the Loss of Commensality in Widowhood: Table 1.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Eating alone is a known risk factor for nutritional vulnerability in later life. Widowhood often entails loss of commensality (shared meals). This article explores this experience among older widowed women in relation to food behavior. METHOD: Qualitative methods based on constructivist grounded theory were used. Interviews were conducted with 15 women living alone in the community, aged 71 to 86 years, and widowed 6 months to 15 years. RESULTS: Widowhood meant having significantly fewer opportunities for commensality. Participants attributed changes to their food behaviors to the loss of commensality, including food choice, fewer regular meals, and reduced work of meal preparation. These changes were attributed to the experienced difference between shared meals and meals eaten alone, no longer having the commitment of commensality, and having less interest in meal preparation in the absence of obligation or reward of commensality. DISCUSSION: Eating alone symbolized loss and was less enjoyable, yet the pleasure experienced with food was intact. Focusing on the pleasure of eating may help support women when they lose regular commensality late in life. Free from the commitment of commensality, some shifted away from regular meals and simplified their meal preparation strategies. This has implications for clinical and research endeavors.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".