In addition, a thread on Weibo, China's Twitter-like comments platform, titled "eating alone" contains 226,000 posts and has garnered 290 million hits.

In 2017, WithEating Magazine, a Chinese foodie journal, started its Eating Alone channel on Bilibili, a popular video-sharing website. To date, the channel, which has 52 episodes explaining how to prepare meals for one, has attracted more than 200 million hits.

In February, the magazine published a book of the same name, listing 65 recipes for dishes ranging from desserts to foreign cuisine, such as roasted ribs, the Korean favorite bibimbap and seafood curry.

To many people's surprise, it became a best-seller. "We didn't expect the book to sell so well. We didn't print enough copies initially," the magazine said on its Weibo account last month.