Vaguely inspired by various threads on here, but not a TAAT as the point I want to make is only tangentially related to those threads.
AIBU to feel that food logistics tend to really get in the way of friendships these days? Perhaps it's just my age, but these days it seems all meetups seem to have to revolve around a meal. It didn't used to be like that. People just used to get together over drinks (I don't necessarily mean a booze-up, I mean a few drinks in a pub, or a cafe in the daytime, or a few coffees at each other's houses) and this used to leave people a lot freer to concentrate on actually making conversation and catching up. Nowadays it seems like it's all about the food, leading to dilemmas about types of food, food intolerances, disagreements over restaurant choices, budgets, whether a specific restaurant is kid-friendly, vegan-friendly, etc etc etc... it just seems to me as though a lot of tensions arise around friendships, purely based on the food element of socialising, and it seems a pity.
I get that food can be a pleasure, but I just think eating out is overrated a lot of the time and I miss the days when it was a really special treat (e.g. for a birthday) rather than an everyday thing like it seems to be now. Plus the whole kerfuffle of deciding what to have, keeping kids under control, having to ask for missing cutlery/condiments etc, constant interruptions from the wait staff, working out how to split the bill, etc etc etc tends to really dull the enjoyment of a meal out for me as it just seems you can't really ever get a conversation going properly. I see my friends to talk to them, not to eat food, and I haven't missed restaurants one iota since lockdown started.
Surely I'm not the only one?
YABU = no, socialising is better with food.
YANBU = sometimes food does get in the way and it would be nice just to concentrate on talking and catching up.