Dare to eat alone

In today's Straits Times, A16 (main section)
NUS undergrads start campaign : "Dare to eat alone"
http://j.mp/dRHETY

You can read the whole story in Straits Times, but just some paraphrased excerpts to summarize it:

Taken from link above

"NUS undergrads Heng and Jude found this fear of eating alone so prevalent that they set up a campaign to raise awareness of this fear and encourage fellow students to look past the stigma"

"Certainly, more people are afraid of eating alone than those who are not. If you eat alone, you give the impression that you have no friends; you are lonely, isolated and basically it is a negative impression created"

'When contacted, an NUS spokesman said: "The Eating Alone in the school canteen' campaign exemplifies the creative and community spirit that can be found in our students".

We, at FASS, are fully supportive of this campaign. After all, we have to support our fellow undergraduates right? Actually, we have already secretly been supporting this campaign, why else do you think there are less chairs than tables in The Deck? It's all to encourage you to eat alone!

To overcome the social stigma of eating alone, Heng and Jude have came up with really cool Tshirts with their slogan '! dare to eat alone" (The exclamation point is meant to be an 'i' as well as the punctuation. #FASScreativity). Everyone should wear the T shirts and eat alone in the future! This way, the 'odd' people will be those who actually still eat in a group!

This is such a great idea. We will also implement a 'Eat Alone Day' on 14th February where everyone in support of the campaign will wear the T shirt and eat on their own! We shall call this minicampaign 'Eating Alone, Together!" (EAT for short)

It doesn't matter that there's a shortage of seating space in the Deck during lunch hours. After all, an individual's psychological well-being is the most important so we have to overcome this first. Supporters of this campaign should continue to eat alone to occupy as many tables as they can, and then they can laugh at those in groups who can't find a table!

In fact, the follow-up of the 'Eating Alone, Together' Day would be for fellow EAT members to eat together, but they cannot sit next to or opposite each other, have to be diagonally-seated! (Otherwise, it wouldn't be alone anymore, would it?)

Our future ideas for EAT would be to get sponsorship from SDU, and then have our own internal dating service! Excellent for singles isn't it! See, it is cool to eat alone. You may meet your Mr/Mrs Right!

So remember, it's ok to have no friends to eat with, in fact, let's make that the next cool thing. DARE TO EAT ALONE!