An Outrageous Scandal: Eating a Sandwich in Public
by Tanja Cilia
Apparently, we have reached the point at which eating a sandwich in the street is being treated as a matter requiring serious public policy. Not the grabbing of a sandwich thrown at someone and gobbling it down, to get rid of the evidence, and not eating something that is so enormous it requires a traffic management plan and a small crane. Just eating in public.
A perfectly ordinary human being, going about the business of being alive, takes a sandwich, a sausage roll, a cold slice of pizza, or a wrap, out of a bag, and eats it. To someone, somewhere, this has become troubling.
Eating out in the street is a perfectly sane, perfectly natural thing to do. Human beings have been eating wherever and whenever they are hungry, since long before we invented restaurants, dining rooms, table reservations, tasting menus and the concept that a napkin must be folded into the shape of a swan before anyone is permitted to touch a bread roll.
The idea that eating in public is somehow wrong and chav, is an absurd suggestion… unless, of course, you live a life in which every meal is served on a silver platter, with linen napkins, and three glasses of water imported from melted icebergs.
The rest of us occasionally eat on the move, because we are hungry, or commuting, or because we have fifteen minutes between one commitment and the next, or because whatever it is, smells good enough to make us drool.
