Eddie’s Food Grievances: Those Heavy Breathers at the Breakfast Buffet
Adeline (nickname: Eddie) loves food—lots of it, and often—and she enjoys eating both at home and out. Usually, that goes well, but sometimes it doesn’t. In the series Eddie’s Food Grievances you can read about the latter. This time: those heavy breathers at the breakfast buffet.
This weekend I checked into a lovely old-school hotel somewhere in the Netherlands. It was the last room available, because it was vacation season and everyone wanted to get away. So it was perfectly possible that, in the height of the season, I had to fork out an exorbitant price for a medium-sized room where I would only sleep. My credit card is still reeling from the shock.
Hovering over the food
Because of covid, I’ll go international for a moment because, after all, I was on vacation, there were some rules around breakfast. First of all, I had to be standing at the entrance at exactly eight o’clock and stick to a time slot. Which is fine, but then the trouble began.
You had to keep one and a half metres away from the other guests at the breakfast buffet, because everyone was allowed to hang over the food without a face mask. That’s where everything went wrong.
Without a shred of embarrassment
In front of me, a couple were piling their breakfast plates sky-high. The man was one of those people in the ‘everything probably tastes fine mixed together’ category. I’m always impressed that someone dares to do this without a shred of embarrassment. I already feel uncomfortable when I take two rolls. The woman was the type who kept coming back, which is difficult when you’re trying to scoop something onto a plate from one and a half metres away.
I stood there like a model citizen, waiting for them to finish—the buffet itself was about one and a half metres long—but every time I thought I could start, she came back. Spoon just dipped into the scrambled eggs, woman needed juice. Slice of bread being cut on the wooden board, woman needed yoghurt. Trying to get a slice of cheese onto a fork, woman needed fruit.
Death to the breakfast buffet
Every time the woman appeared beside me again, I lost time from my time slot, which meant the old-fashioned heavy breathers began appearing behind me. The kind of people who want to hurry you along the rows of food, anything but kindly yet quite forcefully. While I tried to give the returning woman a little privacy in front of me, behind me the heavy-breather&co were elbowing me aside so they could get to the slice of salmon. I took a step aside so the woman could add some more sugar to her coffee, and heavy-breather&co pulled off a cheeky overtaking manoeuvre towards the crispy bacon. It was enough to drive you mad.
I hope we take away one thing from this entire covid situation: the death of the breakfast buffet. No more heavy breathers, no more food going to waste, no more everyone stirring the scrambled eggs with the same spoon. We’ll sleep much happier for it.
Read also:
- Eddie’s Food Grievances: can we please stop sharing food?!
- Eddie’s Food Grievances: eating a boiled egg in public
- Eddie’s Food Grievances: that layer of water at the bottom of the fridge
