Eating Watching People Eating.

I find that watching people eat is a source of perpetual strain. The natural response to this would be, obviously, to stop watching people eat, but that is easier said than done. If I am sitting alone with nothing but my thoughts and a pair of underpants for company then I can see that it would appear rather odd to go out of my way to find someone tucking into a sausage roll or an onion bhaji just so that my worthless judgement can be flung in their general direction. But if I am surrounded by fellow masticators, all busily doing eating in their own individual manner then what else, really, is their to look at? Your own food, beyond making sure it gets moved from table to teeth? That’s mere functionality and it doesn’t take forever. The eyes of a loved one? Surely you remember what they look like by now. The ceiling? The floor? Or if things are really going badly, the door?

The truth is that while watching other people eat is sometimes a poor use of ones time it is also, frequently and simultaneously, nauseating, hilarious and deeply gripping. And very few arenas offer quite the same kaleidoscopic, cinematic and immersive sweep as the hotel buffet breakfast. Breakfast maybe be the most important meal of the day (or so we’re told, usually by very trying people who just want us to know they have nothing wrong with their lives) but it is also the meal that attracts the least personal investment in terms of etiquette, manners, posture and other such gestures of recognition towards the benefits of evolution. And over many years of unofficial observation and scientific analysis I can conclude that breakfast rage, amongst some at least, is an even more potent source of anger and frustration than road collisions and the existence of Jeremy Vine combined. The only negative emotion that doesn’t exist in a hotel breakfast buffet is envy.

There is always something to complain about and yet not a word passes my lips in the direction of anyone that can do anything about it. Just mumbles, tuts and hisses and sharp, intermittent raises of the right eyebrow. The elderly shuffle about, baffled by spoons and toast, their tables littered with 7-day medication trays and the bits of a hearing aid which don’t seem to fit anywhere. I dread growing old specifically because I don’t want to be stared at while I try to remember how to get a cappuccino out of a coffee machine or choose the best croissant, a queue of livid eyes burning holes through the back of my skull. And I don’t wish to be young again; to be so smug yet have so little to be smug about. The young swish about, loved up and, although they don’t know this, waiting for it all to fall apart on a sixpence. There is fear sprinkled on their faces – anxious about kiwi fruit and whether all the bread is gluten free or just the stuff that doesn’t really look like bread at all. While the middle aged and elderly shovel it all back the young pick and sift, poke and shift, unsure as to whether the food they have served themselves might play havoc with their wellbeing or even kill them later that day. What a joyless existence.

I had the same breakfast every day bar one. A glass jar of natural yoghurt with honey (I tried a potted yoghurt one morning, just for the thrill, but the contents had the appearance and texture of chilled, compressed kangaroo semen and so I had to discard it, not least because my last sexual encounter with a kangaroo had not gone anywhere near as well as I’d hoped), three thick slices of orange or grapefruit (in both cases distinguished from their British counterparts by the fact they were ripe, juicy and full of flavour all at the same time – I have an fat orange I bought from M&S during lockdown that still hasn’t ripened), two tiddly slices of some sort of granary toast, both buttered and with a pair of freshly fried eggs. The bacon was as bacon always is on holiday: disappointing enough to make me question what was wrong with the pig it came from. The mushrooms looked like the grated brain and intestines of a buffalo and I have yet to work out who would be interested in sugared fired bread at half past eight in the morning, though this is coming from someone who used to eat Ricicles well into his teens. The sausages came in two formats, short and long, and essentially looked like the before and during photos of an overstimulated Rottweiler’s cock. I was never once tempted to investigate if they tasted as bad as they looked. On one occasion I switched from fried eggs to scrambled but it wasn’t worth the effort; scrambled eggs are hard to master so I decided it would be better to wait until I got home.

I’m not proud that I watch people when they eat, but it does almost always make me feel better about the way I eat. True, I eat too fast, but I compensate for this by not leaving a mess on my plate that would make a four year old blush. And I only ever order something I think I will like; there is a time and a place for taking risks and it is never when choosing what food you want to eat. The highlight was also the soul crushing climax. A couple who I imagine had just flopped into an ill-earned retirement. He was heavily tanned and had the belly and torso of a man who appeared to have just swallowed a fridge whole. She looked like she was trying to get somewhere in some kind of scary 1950’s seaside drag act competition. Despite a fairly competitive range on offer in the airport they had opted to pre-order their lunch on the Jet2 flight. Why anyone would want an airline beef casserole at any time in their lives is a question that would flummox the sharpest of philosophers but there they were, within minutes of taking flight, spooning brown grot into their daft gobs, filling the front half of the plane with the sort of stench you would expect to find spilling out of a barn full of burning silage. I watched them with gritted teeth through every second of their gastronomical journey, and then realised it wasn’t worth the bother; let people eat what they want, how they want. So I looked the other way, at something actually worth looking at, and immediately felt much better. Which was nice.

G B Burton. 18.07.2026