Food talk - hard to digest

We were sitting at a Chinese restaurant. My seating wasn't central; the oversized table had left an awkward expanse of space between us, requiring me to crane my head over to catch bits of the conversation over the din of the restaurant.

They were talking about food.

For some strange reason, I perceive people whose conversational repetoire revolve around food as irksome. You'll find me very agreeable in general. There's some weird ingrained mummy-instinct that has me feigning being patient and generally supportive of most ventures. Yet there are certain comparative trivialities that completely put me off. I'm not talking about the common crimes against humanities or the seven deadly sins - just minor things like faux Western accents, relatives who make unnecessary comments on your appearance and well, talk about food (not to be mistaken for recommendations for dining out).

There's just something I find incredibly boring about talking about food. I mean, eating it is great! I have 24 entries on food on this blog and like an annoying Japanese tourist, tend to insist on photographing dishes before my fellow diners are permitted to dig in. Yet when people sit around talking about what they had for breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner, supper and what they're going to have next whilst still masticating their current meal, my mind drifts off.

Perhaps due to the Gold Coast's limited culinary delights, I find it almost an exclusively Malaysian thing to keep talking about food. I still remember those boring audit days, when I would be stuck in large food-inclined teams. Apart from gossiping about everyone else in the office, Food was the topic du jour. Like every-jour. Every friggin' jour.

During these lengthy discussions on whether we were to have mamak or chicken hor fun or chap fan for lunch and if we should head back to office so we can have nasi lemak for dinner, I would hold my silence and quietly count the days down on my Excel spreadsheet as to when the assignment would finally be over. And pray that the next team would be less food-sy.

And then there are the dieters. My mother once had a friend who was kind, friendly, helpful and a genuinely good friend to her. Unfortunately, she also harboured two extremely grating habits - her penchant for mundane monologues and the fact that the monologues often centred on what she and all her fellow diners had for every single meal, how they felt about it and she felt they felt about it. Listening to her, you would have expected her to weigh 300lbs, but no, Aunty W was as slim as a toothpick and rarely ever finished a meal, preferring instead to pick at her salads whilst eyeing everyone else's dishes (with of course, a running commentary).

Let's not even get started on people who talk about sleep.


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