Are you allowed to hide snacks from your housemates while in quarantine?
There are some questions you’d like to ask, but don’t always dare to. Luckily, we’re here for you. Not only to ask these pressing questions about life, but also to answer them as best we can. This time, a coronavirus special: are you allowed to hide snacks from your housemates while in quarantine?
Adeline: “Whether I’m allowed to? I’ve already done it. At the back of my fridge’s vegetable drawer, under a bag of butter lettuce, there’s a truffle salami, a little Italian ham and some delicious olives. If I put this trio in plain sight, my housemate would have started on it yesterday. While I’m trying to save it for Friday afternoon drinks. No, I’m definitely not going to eat it all by myself. Though of course he doesn’t know I bought truffle salami…”
Laura: “For me, it’s the other way around. During this lockdown, I’ve been eating so much that I’ve now asked my housemate to hide the snacks from me. So as far as I’m concerned, that’s definitely allowed!”
Sharon: “If you knew my housemates: YES! But that’s unrelated to corona, by the way. In other words: I’ve been hiding snacks from those brutes for years. The trick is to keep looking for better hiding places, because they know all the usual suspects (at the back of the cupboard, on top of the cupboard, in the oven, in an empty pan with the lid on) by now. It also helps to buy snacks that only I like. Such as a bowl of sambal goreng tempé pedis. Those crunchy fermented soybeans with shrimp paste, sambal and sugar—delicious! This snack also has an additional advantage: my housemates think it makes me, and I quote, ‘stink horribly from my mouth’. So they keep their distance and let’s be honest: with this mandatory working-from-home situation and schools closed, it’s nice when they’re not sitting on your lip 24/7, right?”
Sabina: “I have. Not to keep my Chipitos safe during corona times, but years ago already. I lived in a house with three adult men, with an appetite comparable to an African locust plague. So if I ever wanted to see a stroopwafel up close, I had to hide them. I put M&M’s in my underwear drawer, rolls of cookies with the cat food and truffle brie in the vegetable drawer. Pure self-preservation.”
Lauretta: “Yes! Absolutely! Nothing is more irritating than just wanting to open that bag of crisps and finding that it has vanished from the kitchen cupboard like snow in the sun. By the way, I don’t only hide snacks in quarantine; I basically do it all the time. That chocolate bar is sacred.”
Delilah: “Of course you’re allowed to hide things from your housemates! Even if they’re family members. For obvious reasons, we already hide all the sweets from the children (although they once did eat 40 pieces of Sportlife chewing gum, but also left a note saying ‘sorry xxx’). And because I know that ‘not everyone’ always looks equally carefully at where things are, I sometimes put a really delicious cold cut from the butcher on the shelf in the fridge between the jars of pickles and sambal. Then I can always say, ‘Huh? I ate it all? Well, it was just in the fridge…’ But yes, that excuse won’t work anymore now that he’s reading this.”
Steffi: “Definitely. Even in non-quarantine times. My mother used to do nothing else. Yet I hardly ever do it myself. I’m of the opinion that food is there to be eaten, and when it’s gone, we’ll buy more. Admittedly, it helps that my housemates (young and old) like completely different things from me, and that the things we all do like (chocolate, nuts, halva, wine (not for the little one, obviously)) are simply available in abundance.”
Tip: if you still haven’t got enough hiding places from all the ones above, you can also take an example from this man. He cleverly managed to steal his girlfriend’s last Dorito and replaced it with toilet paper.
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