"Come sit down here and eat like a family" (eatin

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These days it is rare to hear of families that actually eat together. Ours did for years and years.
I really hate eating together for several reasons.

One, I hate listening to the sound of another person chewing. My youngest brother hates it too. Especially when my mom does it.
Two, I HATE the sound of someone tapping a spoon on the side of a porcelain or glass bowl, or scraping the last bit of whatever from a bowl. It's like nails on chalkboard for me. Similarly, the compulsive plate-cleaner noise (people getting EVERY LITTLE BIT off their plate, even semiliquid material, WITH A FORK OR A KNIFE OR BOTH, and making a HORRID ANNOYING scraping sound while doing it!! !! ARGH!) drives me absolutely insane. Or someone 'wiping' off their knife onto their fork (again, scraping noise ARGH! AND THIS IS CONSIDERED GOOD MANNERS?!)
I also hate it when someone goes "mmmmmmmm" too much or "Mmmmmm, delicious" more than once. Or my dad slurping his soup. And he eats a LOT of soup. Including for breakfast.
I also can't stand dinner conversation. It's like, people are supposed to be eating!

I don't get the whole "don't read at the table" bit. I like to read when I eat to slow myself down. I compulsively eat very quickly if I am not distracted by something like a book magazine or newspaper. My parents and grandparents do not understand this.

Aside from things I can't stand to hear, there's things I can't stand to SEE.
Can't stand to watch old people eat. Especially if they haltingly open their mouth way before the fork ever gets there.
Can't stand to see anyone hold a piece of bread, then put chili or something on the bread, then eat it.
Can't stand to see anyone use bread or any other food to "mop up" their plate.
Can't stand to see a plate that has been fanatically cleaned.

And they wonder why I hide in my room for thanksgiving or christmas or easter dinner...or just dinner in general.

Two things used to bug me:

1. The sound of someone crunching on chips like Doritos.

2. The sound of someone chewing ice.

My mom used to chew ice and take her cup and jar it so the ice would clank together and make a lot of noise, then she would get more ice and chew it. That was when she had anemia but since she doesn't have that anymore, she no longer crunches ice. She crunched ice the entire time I was growing up.

I feel EXACTLY the same. I hate sitting at the table very much. I prefer holding a distance from other people when I eat. Like when i blow my nose or spit out phlegm. If i eat together with other people, i prefer to sit in front of TV or so, it distracts from the chewing etc...

At my parents house, we eat together at the dinner table at dinner time only and that only happened a few nights a week since everyone had different work schedules, or sport schedules.Every other time of the day, they just eat what they want in their rooms or outside or in the family room downstairs while playing games.Stepmom is NT but she likes to sit in her big lazy boy chair in the livngroom with a cup of tea and her dinner while watching various tv shows.

my teefs are temp sensitive so I can't even imagine someone chewing ice >.>

I don't have that much trouble with eating together, but I'm not very close to my family so we don't really talk at dinner, which makes it awfully boring and time-wasting.

These days we simply do it in front of the television.

Ahh, I learned to ignore the eating sounds knowing I have the same problem. In your case it doesn't sound too bad when your family makes decent food from the sound of it ><. However, my dad is a bit disgusting and passes gas in the table (this annoys the hell out of me). Supper time is probably the only time I spend with my family so I take it seriously.

Dads fart to mark their territory and posessions. It's very primitive, like occipital buns...

I havent' eaten at the family table for years! My son is almost 11 and i don't think we have ever all eaten at the table. Heck, we can't even keep him seated long enough anyways. Nothing really bothers me about eating at the same time at the same table, but it irritates me when others who don't understand my kid decide to make him sit down and eat, or finish his food, etc. and keep bugging him til he does and gets upset and refuses to eat anything. He is picky in the first place, so i like things to go smoothly. Eating should be as stress-free as possible.

I've never liked crunching on it either. I can chew it, but it's not that much fun. I'd rather drink water. Ice seems so hollow even though it isn't. It's like less filling water. It's good when walking outside on a very hot day.

I hate that family eating thing. Not just because I don't like what others do with their food (wiping sauce of their plate with bread, licking the knife, other stuff I consider bad manners) or because I do some odd things of my own (making everything on my plate neat, eating the inside of the pie before the crust, other quirky food habits) but because it's just not how I was brought up. My mum and I were alone when I was growing up and we ate our meals on our knees. Same at my Grandma's. Everyone sitting round the table is like Christmas or something.

Another reason I don't like it is that I feel self-conscious eating at someone else's house. Whenever I've been invited for dinner to a boy/girlfriend's home and their parents and siblings were going to be there I felt petrified. I knew they would quiz me and I didn't really understand a lot of social rules, so I was worried I'd come across weird. I was worried I'd do something wrong, commit some social faux pas. I was worried about what they would serve, especially meat as my whole family is vegetarian and I didn't even taste red meat till I was 16. Plus it all seemed unbelievably twee and silly, like something from the Waltons, the way they all acted with each other.

These days I live alone so I eat alone and I love it. I do sit at the table though, but I can still see the telly

We eat as a family-my children and I. But we also have the TV on, and turn it up fairly loud so we aren't looking at one another much or hearing each other chewing or any of that. Also, we all like the same cartoons, so it's an easy distraction. We like eating together, though.... actually, we do a lot of things together. But I think that is probably because they are still young.

I'm the one who leaves his plate clean (since seconds will usually be served on the same plate, and I don't like it all getting mixed up with the remains of whatever we had for entreé), so that much doesn't bother me. But I can't stand it when someone starts cutting something with a knife and makes the whole table shake, or when they start tapping on the table with their fingers (making it shake, too), or when they open the refrigerator door behind me (hitting my chair as I'm swallowing some piece of food). And I won't wait for others to finish, I'll just get up and go to my room or elsewhere to do anything else I need to do or was doing when I had to interrupt it for eating, I can't stand the waste of time it is to just sit there doing nothing. Oh, and forget about leaving whatever I'm doing just because "it's lunch time" or "it's dinner time"! I won't interrupt what I'm doing just at any place... I mean, imagine if a lifeguard would stop in the middle of rescueing a drowning person just to go have lunch, there is such a thing as priorities!
Of course, at the office it's a little different than at home, conversation tends to be more interesting, though I try to focus on eating rather than talking. Lately I've been going out for lunch with my coworkers more often, since nobody was registering their exit and return times for lunch and we got a complaint, and even though I wasn't going out (just staying at my workplace eating a couple of sandwiches while I kept working), I'm still expected to register those times, so I better actually do something...

Oh, and I just remembered the stupid routine lunches on Sundays we had at my uncle's house back then when my grandmother was still alive, my stupid uncle (I've already mentioned him, IIRC) always thinks he's the center of the universe so all the family should go to his house every Sunday for lunch (as if nobody could possibly have other plans), the damn lunch would start late and I'd be starving, and the conversation was ALWAYS the same, complaining about this and that politician or about the annoying housemaid my grandmother had, one day I couldn't stand it anymore and shouted, "well, why don't you get up and do something about it instead of sitting there complaining? Because every Sunday it's the same, you complain about the same damn things but you never do anything to change them! Either that, or stop complaining if you won't do anything to change things!" Of course, they just kept doing that, but I would just go elsewhere to watch TV or read the Reader's Digest from then on with my plate, and damn them all... then at some point (I think it was after my grandmother died) I got sick of the damn Sunday lunches and stopped going, I had better things to do on Sunday. And to this day my stupid uncle expects others to cancel their plans if he calls on Sunday morning to tell them to go have lunch at his house, I can't stand how my parents fall for it instead of telling him "No, thanks, we have other plans, next time tell us in advance"...

mom's obsessed with the whole 'eating like a family'. She thinks it's bad that we rarely do anymore.

My parents have always been really into the whole eating dinner as a family thing. I don't really hate eating together, I just don't really understand the point. I've never thought of eating as a social activity. I mean, eating and conversing shouldn't go together. It doesn't make sense. I like to read while I eat. I also don't like having to wait around hungry - unless it's one of my nights to make dinner, we have to wait until everyone is home and seated at the table.

In high school, my friend's mother would fart at the table. On purpose. She would actually lift a cheek off the chair and strain a bit; you know, making an effort to fart. At the dinner table. If it happens by accident (and it shouldn't, because you should be aware that you are at the table), then say "pardon me".

I have a hard time with eating-noises, as well, especially when people breathe through their mouth when eating cereal. Munch munch, breathe, munch munch, breath. Ugh!

Last edited by elderwanda on 05 Oct 2009, 5:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.