While some people relish the variety that comes from dining out and sharing multiple dishes among companions, others like me have a different perspective. Eating out for me is about gaining the restaurant experience, but it's also about satisfying my culinary desires-I order what I want to taste.

Shared meals can be a minefield. When you're sharing your table’s fare, you have to consider the implications of having another mouth - or several - nibbling from your plate. They may disrupt the balance of your meal, consuming that bite you had mentally reserved as your final, satisfying taste. Imagine saving the last piece of a decadent mac and cheese only to have it swiped away, leaving you with the far less appealing prospect of finishing your meal with a green bean. Yet, some people seem unphased by these complexities and dive right into communal eating.

Sure, sharing food can be simple when we're dealing with foods like pizza. Dividing the slices equally seems a no-brainer, unless you're dealing with an odd number of people and an uneven division of slices. But plates like a mixed calamari, without clear delineation between servings, becomes a puzzle. How do you ensure equality when you can’t discern individual portions or account for differing taste preferences?

Equity among tablemates could involve breaking out a food scale, ensuring an equal ounce distribution. But what happens when you have four diners and just three servable croquettes? Someone either misses out or you engage in the complicated endeavor of slicing each croquette to share equally-a solution unlikely to be undertaken by many.

Dessert seems the real issue here. Often labeled as a dish "for the table", diners rarely want to claim a whole dessert to themselves. Shared desserts help assuage the unwarranted guilt that accompanies personal dessert indulgence. But not all desserts lend themselves to equal division. An individual tart or panna cotta can't be as easily shared as a full cake, sliced to serve the party. And then, you've got the added complications of melting ice cream or potential contamination through successive bites if you attempt the "take turns" tactic. Thus, sharing food can turn into an anxiety-driven math problem.

Simply put, if you want to share a dessert, seek out options like churros that lend themselves to uniform division. Yet, perhaps the most straightforward solution is my tactic – order your own dessert and stick to the “one bite of mine equals one bite of yours” sharing rule.

I believe restaurants could simplify this social dilemma by offering dynamic serving sizes, particularly with appetizers. Having an adjustable order quantity based on the number of diners would ease the struggle. A clear indication of the quantity of servings on a menu would let the mathematically challenged among us know in advance what we're up against.

In the end, there’s always that one person who magnanimously passes on the last piece, but I would bet that a pang of remorse persists beyond the meal. The sense of sacrifice can cling to you longer than the food satisfies your hunger, leading to regret and the rhetorical question, “What did I gain?” Sharing is caring, as the saying goes, but when it comes to dining out, individual servings definitely have their merits.