Eddie’s food annoyances: the crunching of your cracker in company
Adeline (nickname: Eddie) loves eating, a lot and often, both at home and out. Usually, that goes well, but sometimes it doesn’t. In the series Eddie’s food annoyances you can read about the latter. This time: eating crackers in company.
For a whole year, I could do whatever I wanted without anyone seeing. Scrape the last bit of divine sauce from my plate with my finger? I did it without shame. Pour a splash of honey onto the tub of yogurt and then eat it with a spoon straight from the container? Guilty. Grind a cracker to bits without anyone hearing how much noise you’re making? What a delight.
I ate behind closed doors and without any social correction, because there wasn’t a living soul who could see me. Apart from my other half, that is, but they’re used to quite a lot from me.
A little awkward
So it happened this week that I suddenly had to eat in company again, with people I don’t know very well. I had two kinds of hummus in a bowl, a stack of crackers, and simply hadn’t considered beforehand how much noise this makes. I took a generous amount of hummus—so generous that I started wondering whether this was a portion for at home or one for eating out—and spread it thickly over the cracker in question. So far so just a little awkward. Exactly as eating with people you barely know is supposed to be.
Baby-food-like mush
But then I took my first bite. It was as if my molars produced a booming sound straight through my cheeks. I swear I saw the woman I had just met for the first time look up startled from across the table. Out of embarrassment, I immediately stopped chewing. Which doesn’t work either, because then you’re left with a grainy bite of cracker and hummus in your mouth, and everyone notices the absence of sound from your cracker. So I carried on chewing half-heartedly and tried to crunch and crackle as little as possible, which ultimately leaves you with a kind of baby-food-like mush. For crying out loud.
Fighting rumbling with crunching
After that first cracker, I breathed a little sigh of relief, only for a stray crumb to shoot to the back of my throat. That was followed by tears and a coughing fit that drew everyone’s attention to me once again—after the crunching. So far so still a little awkward, but manageable. Until I suddenly realized I still had two (!) crackers to go. You might think: girl, why not just eat those later? But my stomach was rumbling about as loudly as my cracker had been crunching, so I had to get that under control too. In this awkward situation, I fought the rumbling with crunching.
Soggy sandwich
What did I end up doing? The do-or-die tactic. With impressive noise and at tremendous speed, I stuffed my hummus-dipped crackers into my mouth. In the process, I produced such an ear-splitting racket that I was certain everyone would go home and talk about that new person with the crunchy crackers. Luckily, today I’m allowed to eat deliciously behind the scenes again. And next time, I’m bringing a soggy sandwich for eating out.
Also read:
- Eddie’s food annoyances: restaurant turn-offs (that I’m almost starting to crave now)
- Eddie’s food annoyances: the supermarket sample
- These are the 7 gross sins that a great many people are guilty of
