Watching Me, Watching Food

People are watching us eat. Studying our mouths. Honing in on our food choices. These same people are gonna see the broccoli jammed into your front teeth first. They'll feel that green dot crammed in you before you do. They'll instruct you on where it is, what to do. They're gonna smell that garlic miasma hanging out on your tongue; it doesn't belong to them, so they'll smell it all the more. They'll inform you that you reek of garlic. That your tongue is blue from some candy you absentmindedly crunched up. That there's a river of gravy running down your beard. Eating sure is a spectator spot. Plop a starving person down in front of you to study that steak dinner your eating and, assuming they are physically restrained, they'll recap the best parts of your meal like its a songs of the 70's commercial.

 

I don't like when other people watch me eat. My family is somewhat to blame. My maniacal brother and sister police the mean streets of sloppy eating with the sort of ruthlessness that makes even opening a bag of chips an uneasy affair. Its not the same if everyone is eating. Everyone can sort of turn in to themselves and gobble. It's great fun to pause from some enormous feast, only to find almost everyone hunched over, using these tiny, curved tools, scooping bite after bite into their open/close mouth garages. If you pick someone out of that crowd of feasters and just stare, intimately examine their every motion, their every chew, they'll probably sense your gaze and look up. It's the very look of animalistic ownership, of, "Fuck you want? You have your own to eat. Are you disgusted by my eating? Cut it out. Leave me be." Don't try it. You'll upset the order of eating.

Someone at my work likes to talk to me while I'm eating. They are "working" and I am eating. They prattle on about whatever must be mentioned to me mid meal. And I feel like I am getting hijacked. Like they have stripped my lips away and jammed my ears full of their meaningless words. I don't want to think about their words while I eat. If we were both partaking in meals, coming up for breaths that allowed us to take turns spitting out words, that'd probably work. We'd share pace and understanding. Don't misunderstand me, meals aren't solemn affairs of stuffing face. There is room for some language between bites. But there is a styling to a meal that makes people feel like they are sharing an experience. If you are trying to eat and someone has decided it is high time they carry on to you while you are sealed shut by the hunk of cud in your mouth, well that's just unfair. I am not going to snap at this coworker with a nasty, "Can't you see I'm just trying to eat?". That would disrupt the entirety of their personality. They would hate me forever. No. If I could remove myself from the situation I would but that is not something that really works here. So there I am, hunched over my plate, nodding my head, pushing out the occasional grunt of compliance, as their yapping starts to coat my food, leaving it with the bitter taste of unwanted socialization. I shove all the crap down and do my best to sit there and look like a stupid and hungry animal, punishing them with my crystal clear disinterest.