Tempted by the food of another

I like eating food that doesn't belong to me. (There. I said it.) It's not because I'm hungry or that the food tastes good. It's the fact that I shouldn't be eating it because it doesn't belong to me. It all started quite innocently... when Six Degrees left her toddler daughter's lunch at my condo after a party. It was a tiny tupperware full of bite-sized pasta, that didn't look that great... but I ate it anyway. It was thrilling because it was a meal lovingly made by a mother for her child... and I was secretly eating it.

Now you may be thinking that this was an isolated incident. I mean, how often do I come across misplaced food, right? Well, a few weeks ago I was at the local supermarket. I had started putting groceries into my shopping cart. Some bread, a bag of onions, tomatoes, etc.... I went to get some oranges, then put them into my cart and continued on. When I hit the meat section, I realized that the tomatoes in the cart were vine tomatoes and the bread loaf was not the type that I had picked out earlier. I had accidentally swapped carts with a stranger. I looked at what my mystery shopper had put in the cart. Some mushrooms, mangos, hot peppers and peaches. How exciting! My mystery shopper was no doubt very meticulous in selecting each of these items and had some unknown plan to cook them and eat them. I decided to keep the stranger's food. It felt like stealing, but it wasn't... because I paid for the food at the checkout counter.

Another time, my wife offered to carry a tupperware container for a friend of hers. They couldn't meet up afterwards, so my wife and I were on the subway with the container. I wisely told her: "That food is probably going to go bad if we don't eat it now." It was true, so we ate it. It was a delicious pastry with chocolate and cream cheese inside. Perhaps her friend had planned to bring these pastries to a pot-luck or share them with someone special. While the pastry was delicious, it was more delicious because it didn't belong to us.

With each new incident of food-snatching, the behaviour becomes more addictive. It's a weird combination of kleptomania and gluttony. Most recently, my wife had to stop me from eating a day old peanut butter sandwich lovingly made by a mother for her toddler daughter (again, it was Six Degrees). I thought to myself: "My god, what have I become? I am not an animal! Not some kind of food-snatching animal!"

On that note, I have made great strides to overcome my strange habit. I have stopped eating other people's food for over two weeks now. I've regulated myself to only eating food that belongs to me. Boring food that I am 100% entitled to and expected to eat... (Emotional pause.) I guess I'll have to take this one day at a time.... One day at a time.