Standing Room | 28 February 2009

A family-sized bag of Minstrels. A tube of sour-cream-flavoured Pringles. A drum of popcorn. Cookie-dough-flavoured Häagen-Dazs ice-cream. A litre of Diet Coke. For one brief moment I actually thought Ocado had extended their home delivery service to include Chelsea cinemas. I had to move my handbag off the floor just to make room for the supermarket sweep of junk food a couple beside me brought to consume while ostensibly watching He’s Just Not That Into You. By the time the trailer ended and the film began I found myself unable to concentrate and was furiously overidentifying with the sentiments contained in the title. Believe me, I just wasn’t that into either of them. I felt as though I’d been forced to gatecrash a bulimics’ picnic. I love public displays of affection — there’s something rather heart-warming about hearing the smooch of a snog — yet I deeply resent paying to sit next to and be distracted by the cacophonous soundtrack of a couple picking-and-mixing their way through a smorgasbord of snacks at the movies. I was sorely tempted to nudge them and suggest they ‘got a room’. Preferably a dining-room.

Eating while being entertained is not just noisy and antisocial; it’s also unhealthy, unnecessary and extortionately overpriced. Cinema and theatre admissions in the UK are apparently enjoying a record-breaking boom, but the feel-good endorphins released by recession-induced escapism are surely compromised if accompanied by calorific binges. Casual eating habits have become the accepted norm and us baby-boomers are probably the worst offenders. We may disguise our disgust by jumping on the Daily Mail bandwagon of middle-class concerns and blame the rising levels of obesity on a lack of education and family values but the truth is we’re all guilty.