Eddie’s Food Irritations: Can We Stop Sharing Food Already?!

Adeline (nickname: Eddie) loves food, a lot of it and often, both at home and out. That usually goes well, but sometimes it doesn’t. In the series Eddie’s Food Irritations you’ll read about the latter. This time: why we need to stop sharing food that isn’t meant to be shared.

There comes the waiter with a mound of sweet potato fries and a double portion of truffle mayonnaise (annoying how that ratio is always off—but that’s one for next time). I take another delicious sip of wine and suddenly I see it happen. My dining companion reaches out a hand to quickly steal a fry from my plate, before they’ve eaten anything from their own plate or I’ve eaten from mine.

Just order your own sweet potato fries with truffle mayo, will you? And keep your mitts off MY FRIES. Of course, I never actually say it like that—you understand. I know how to behave.

Take What You Can Get

I never have a problem with food that’s intended to be shared. Unlike some of my colleagues, I’m even a big fan of the shared dining concept. I could share a table at NENI every day (God, I can’t wait), although I’d have no problem finishing the whole table by myself, either. That too. At home, I also prefer to throw everything onto one big board under the motto: you’ll see what you can grab. That kind of attitude.

But food that I had planned for myself and myself alone, I really like to keep for myself. But then I don’t tell my fellow diners that (which sounds like blackheads), because then you’re being stingy. I do know where it comes from, though.

Curry in the Stairwell

Back when I was a student and in the rare possession of my own kitchenette, stove and some cooking skills, my housemate would always come running into my room while I was cooking. It was easy to figure out when I was doing that, because outside, in the stairwell, in the hallway and in her room, it would smell like whatever I was making.

So one day you’d have a stairwell with curry and the next day a bathroom with pesto pasta. Like a true foodie (she even writes cookbooks by now), she would throw herself at my pan, while I heard a kind of shout from which I gathered that she wanted to taste it—and then proceeded to do so. While I, the actual mother of this dish, hadn’t taken a bite yet.

I would stand there crestfallen, staring at my pawed-over dish, because if you’re the person who prepared it, you ought to have sole rights to it. You should be the very first person to taste that virgin dish. In my opinion. Even if it’s just to disguise or improve any fuck-ups. It also tastes just a little less delicious in my head if someone got there before me.

Sneaky Piece of Work

I say this is where it started, but maybe I’d already thought my brother was a massive asshole long before that, because he always used to raid all the good stuff from the table first, too. Yes, you can tell. This really goes much deeper than that one sweet potato fry. And besides, I simply want to devour every piece of what I came up with and what is therefore rightfully mine. That too.

I would honestly never go out to dinner with myself, because I do like stealing fries from other people’s plates when I didn’t order them myself. What a sneaky piece of work I am.

Also read:

• Eddie’s Food Irritations: Eating a Boiled Egg in Public
• Eddie’s Food Irritations: That Layer of Water at the Bottom of the Fridge
• Eddie’s Food Irritations: Restaurant Turn-Offs (That I’m Almost Starting to Crave)
• Eddie’s Food Irritations: The Supermarket Spot Check
• Eddie’s Food Irritations Melt Away Like Snow in the Sun with This Golden Food Tip