My fiancé eats his meals one item at a time. For example, served meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and green beans, he would eat all the meatloaf, then stir the gravy into the mashed potatoes and eat all of them, then skip the green beans. Lasagna and breadsticks? All the lasagna, then the breadsticks. Burger and fries? The burger, then the fries.
A friend inspects his meat for any speck of something like gristle or fat, and meticulously removes it. He looks like a surgeon, and his nose is about an inch away from his food. The surgery generally takes several minutes.
I know I can be way too picky about things, so I am curious if others would notice if someone ate this way. If so, what would you think?
I probably wouldn’t notice the one-thing-at-a-time eater until I’ve eaten with him/her many times. I just don’t pay that much attention to how people eat, and it seems like that would be something that could be easily missed.
The surgeon, on the other hand, would drive me nuts. If there’s a large piece of gristle or fat, just leave it on the plate. If you really hate fat/gristle so much that you have to do microscopic surgery on your meat, order the chicken. Nobody wants to watch that.
Oh, he does it with chicken, too. just remembered another one. He eats burgers by eating around the edges and then eating the middle, like a kid eating the crust off a sandwich.
I wouldn’t think anything of one-thing-at-a-time. Once you explained it, I think that’s how I eat. I mean, not intentionally. I know I’ll have some fries and maybe go back to the burger (usually in an attempt to have at least some before they’re cold), but I’m a light eater and it doesn’t take much for me to fill up, so if I’m not paying attention I’ll accidentally fill up on the ‘wrong’ thing. I’d rather fill up on the burger or lasagna then the fries or breadsticks. In fact, when I go out to eat, and they bring out a bread basket (or something similar), I either have to be careful to limit myself or just not eat any at all or I won’t be hungry when the main course comes out.
I didn’t know there was anything wrong with the one at a time style.
ETA, if it’s a mashed potatoes/meat/vegetable type thing, I just the opposite. I try to get some of each on the fork/in my mouth with each bite. Hmm, that sounds gross/messy. You probably wouldn’t notice unless you were explicitly paying attention, it’s not like I’m cramming huge amounts of food down my throat.
My daughter had a friend who ate one thing at a time, and she couldn’t have anything touching on her plate. It didn’t bother me, but I do wonder why someone eats like that. I do think I prefer it to someone who’d mix up everything into one gloppy mess. OK, yeah, I did that as a kid, but only when we had mashed potatoes. I’ve grown out of it.
My sister sniffs everything. She’s a super-picky eater anyway, and she’s suspicious of someone sneaking a speck of onion or a shake of black paper on her plate. She’s always been like that and she drives me nuts!
I probably make people crazy with the way I eat pizza - crust first. Don’t judge me!
We were at dinner with some co-workers and my wife mentioned the weirdness of the one at a time thing she had noticed with someone else. One of the guys at the table was eating exactly like that and no one had noticed.
Personally I never watch people eat or care how they do so. I think this came from my evil step-father who simply mashed everything on his plate together and ate it like that. I could never watch it and just naturally avert my eyes from your plate.
The one-thing-at-a-time eater I would find amusing, but harmless.
The food surgeon, I would find annoying, and I would stop sharing mealtimes with him.
I had a colleague who had a very small appetite, and so whenever we would eat out, he would have a lot of left-over food. That’s fine. In fact, good for him. But what he would do next would kind of gross me out. He would proceed to play with his food by tearing it all up into tiny bits, so that he would end up with a mound of mixed garbage. It was like he was digesting his food outside his body. That annoyed me.
A friend of mine does fat surgery on his food (good way to describe it, by the way). He also blots any excess oil off with a serviette.
Usually it doesn’t bother me, but once we went out for Peking duck and he ended up excising just about all of it except for the skin, which seemed tragically wasteful to me.
I agree wholeheartedly. I probably wouldn’t notice the one-thing-at-a-time eater. I would mercilessly mock the food surgeon but it wouldn’t bother me exactly. I’m pretty tolerant of food weirdness since I’m one of those people who does not want her food items touching each other on the plate (unless they are intended to do so, like potatoes and gravy).
I don’t like food items touching and am mostly a one-thing-at-a-timer, although I try to be inconspicuous about it when eating in public. It helps that my favorite cuisines - Mexican, Chinese, Thai - are ones where I don’t mind mixing nearly as much.
However, I live in the midwest. My in-laws have a lot of get-togthers where the main ingredients seem to be mayonnaise, jello salads, and fried chicken, and those kinds of things touching actively repulses me. At this summer’s fourth of July reunion (when I was about nine thousand months pregnant), I was talking to my husband’s great aunt when I noticed what she was eating - jello & strawberry salad, mashed potatoes, and meatloaf - all on the same fork. I actually had to excuse myself to avoid being sick. It still grosses me out to think about it.
just remembered another one. He eats burgers by eating around the edges and then eating the middle, like a kid eating the crust off a sandwich.