Hate the sound of people eating when I am not eating.

I hold my breath whilst walking past smokers too.

As for noisy eaters - I hate them too. There's at least one man who makes so much noise when he eats. I've now taken to wearing ear plugs whenever he's around me.

Having Hyperacusis hasn't helped me at all.

I also hold my breath when walking past people with the disgusting habit of cigarette smoking. They could at least have the curtesy of smoking in a private place, then I would not mind!

Hohner: strangely, the noise of animals munching does not bother me. I actually love the calming noise of sheep munching on grass, or even pigs eating out of the trough for that matter. I simply dislike humans munching LIKE ANIMALS all the time, particularly because the food in question tends to stink.  My dislike is context specific.

It happened again the other day. The same person munched on a bag of crisps while walking down a pavement. I walked really fast to escape the munching noise, and this kind of ruined what was supposed to be a pleasant late afternoon stroll. I am too polite to tell her how offensive I find the constant grazing. Earlier she had put some hand cream on in my company, creating a horrible smell, and this is why I decided to go on a walk in the first place, to escape the 'clinical' smell of the hand cream. I don't know why it bothers me so much, but it does, for a variety of reasons.

You are expressing the Classic autism oversensory sound trait, for me it is white noise. HOPE, you are trying in your mind to control the environment which you can not as you correctly say. You should see me around family member who smoke, I stick my mouth under my jumper, if I do not I will hold my breathe until I near faint. But they are oblivious to my sensory needs, so my suggest is, is to just move physically and therefore psychologically distance yourself away from the stimulas. You are going to have to live with it, so just structure your response into a comfort zone, not anxiety nor anger. Good Luck anti-muncher  Oh, don't apply for a job feeding pigs  

Who are they harming Hope?

No-one.

And I mean real harm.

Not "I don't like the sound or smell of it".

In some cultures, eating while walking is still considered rude, and I agree: Japan, France and Chile, for example.

Two generations ago children were taught that eating down the high-street, unless at a festival or by the seaside, was vulgar and bad manners. How times have changed, and I am only 25. This is Americanization, corporate/consumer Capitalism, where time is movement instead of contemplative 'being'. People smoke, eat, text  while walking: an oral culture, mindless and banal.

Yesterday I was with someone who, at 3.30pm, said she needed to eat a sandwich. 3.30pm!!! Had she not already had lunch? Yes, she had - quite a big one at that. Anyway, that was bad enough, but she ate  it while walking down the high-street and inside a book shop!. How vulgar!. I felt so stressed, and started walking fast so that I would not hear the munching and smell the product. Then, in a supermarket, she ate some nuts and dried fruit. Constant munching and grazing, so uncouth and slovenly.

It was not the fact that Hope finds eating in public 'disgusting' that I was commenting on, it was the fact she equates 'not eating in public' with 'polite behaviour' and 'eating in public' with 'impolite, uncouth, and animal like'. These, notions of 'polite' and 'impolite', are the culturally imposed stereotypes to which I was refering.

What makes something 'polite' other than society saying it is so? There is nothing inherently 'wrong' or 'bad' about eating in public, it is only our parents, guardians, and teachers telling us that that makes it so.

As for what I mean by 'harm' and 'causing harm' - I find bright, direct, light painful, but the sun, or a light bulb, is not 'causing me harm' in any meaningfull sense of the verb 'to cause' - for something 'to cause' something it must be directly responsible for the outcome, but the sun, or a bulb, is not directly responsible for the pain I experience. The pain is a side effect of the combined conditions of the sun, or bulb, producing light, and my having Asperger's. But, if I punch someone in the face, then I am directly responsible for the harm and so can be said to have caused it.

I remember at school eating on the street used to be very bad manners, 

now I guess with the high stress lifestyle its more common and acceptable but I dont find it odd someone is offended by it.

Obviously some drunk eating a takeaway curry on the train next to you is not nice, 

I wouldnt mind someone eating a chococolate bar but a squashy cream cake is pushing it.

Lets not discuss farting in lifts.

This is interesting.

Of course people are free to pursue behaviour in public that is not a direct threat to health or would cause real tangible harm. Now ,of course we can debate  what we mean by 'harm' , but I think we all understand what behaviour constitutes harm on a public level: violence, threatening behaviour and speech, for example. But would we consider spitting in public, coughing without covering one's mouth, not washing hands after using the loo harmful? . Our law does not police this type of behaviour, and I don't think it should, because otherwise we would live in a police state. However, this behaviour is arguably 'harmful' on some level, because it poses a hygiene risk, and this is why most people consider it 'impolite'. Politeness and  harmfulness often occupy the same domain. Spitting on the street is uncouth and impolite because it potentially poses a health risk!

This debate is becoming very confusing to me.

Though Hope says she regards people eating in public as ‘impolite’, she doesn’t seem to be saying that it’s socially inappropriate on principle, she’s saying that she finds it personally offensive – I don’t see any culturally imposed stereotype... I guess that they're basically being inconsiderate... but it would be hard to 'police' public eating!

If that’s the case, I think it's basically fair to say that it causes her ‘harm’ in terms of her general mental/emotional well-being, and why would anybody else have the right to enjoy food in public any more than Hope has the right to not be made to feel uncomfortable by this act?

The objective difference between harm and etiquette is debateable, given how embroiled humanity and individual identity is within social constructs anyway.

As somebody else says, firstly, what constitutes ‘harm’ and when is ‘harm’ a bad thing?

As a single example, one member of The Flaming Lips attributes managing to quit heroin to being slapped across the face by another member of the band.

Of course, you can go on endless tangents: is somebody quitting heroin a good thing? Is taking heroin harmful? Maybe it doesn’t matter that any given individual does or doesn’t do drugs... what’s a drug anyway?

But aside from that, there are virtually endless examples of when physical intervention is the less harmful route.

People also enjoy sport - enough to participate voluntarily - some of which are very rough.

So society just isn't so simple.

Aside from that, it also seems pretty well established that some people enjoy physical pain - in any number of forms, that we can glorify gruelling hardship for example - and that emotional suffering can be a form of attention-seeking, but just going by the example you’ve given, the debate is still broader than this.

Giving someone a flower typically involves arbitrarily ending the life of a plant – apparently to give a small, fleeting sense of pleasure to somebody (and when this isn’t the only way of doing so).

I'd say that the biological reality of neurological impact from these human interactions is a scientifically demonstrable fact, and I don’t think you can really say we have brains that respond to our environment due to imposed cultural and social conventions (excluding using in the absolutely broadest sense: the fact of our birth I suppose) - even though these conventions might affect our brain development... and probably undoubtedly the subjective inferral of meaning and implication of our surrounding environment.

So I don't see that Hope is conforming to socially imposed cultural stereotypes by saying she finds it repellent when she sees people eat in public – at least not anymore than we can say that anybody is culturally ‘pure’ and entirely socially uninfluenced.

I mean, ultimately, it’s no less conforming to socially imposed cultural stereotypes to regard those who share her view as ‘snobs’... maybe even more so...

So to assume that eating in public is harmless and so presumably, 'normal', 'right' and 'correct' and takes precedent over somebody finding it difficult (or, for that matter, to say that giving somebody a freshly killed plant is ‘nice’) seems to be basically clinging to these notions on principle, as etiquette, isn't it?

In which case - to my mind at least - if anybody is contradicting themselves here, I think it’s Scorpion0x17 - no offence intended.

I do think however – and this is why I posted before about the socially-evolutionary historical context of eating – that to regard people eating in public as indicative of social decline founded upon a personal response to this might be a somewhat unscientific sociological conclusion.

What's civilisation? What's decline? How do we measure and judge these things?

How do we all feel about people reading at the dinner table?

How do you define harm? Some noises, (including eating) are painful for me.

Hope said:

Well that is true, but the social structures I am talking about are to do with polite behaviour.

But what are 'polite' and 'impolite' other than culturally imposed stereotypes?

Hope said:

I am not a cultural relativist, and believe that some types of behaviour are better than others.

Sure, giving someone a flower is better than punching them in the face.

But giving someone a flower is not better because it's polite, it's better because it does no harm (or, at least, is very unlikely to do harm) to either person.

Or in other words, if someone does something that causes no harm, why does it matter whether it's consider socially and culturally polite or not?

Well that is true, but the social structures I am talking about are to do with polite behaviour. I am not a cultural relativist, and believe that some types of behaviour are better than others.

Etiquette, social structures and norms are all just as culturally imposed as any stereotype.

What contradiction? Please explain

Hope said:

But health issues with snacking , if there are indeed any (a point of contention), I think are less important here than the erosion of etiquette and social structure/norms.

You're such a fascinating bag of contradiction, Hope.

I love it!

Interesting stuff Darth Reagon.

I also think it is not so much WHAT you eat (although obviously from a health perspective this is very important) but HOW and WHERE you eat. This is because manners are very important. I think that free-market liberalization has a lot of responsibility for the breakdown in social norms. Individualism and the consumer society emphasise individual choice, including where you decide to eat, even if, from a social perspective, it is arguably antisocial, and with reason. Eating in a busy shop is smelly, dirty and obtrusive.  If, for example, you are looking at some clothes in the supermarket and a person next to you is chomping noisily on a gooey pasty, what goes through your mind?. I, for one, want to walk away. I do, I must admit, have quite a strong sense of smell, and can smell things that don't bother other people. But, then there is the munching noise (quite distracting) and the fact that the pasty could dirty a new item of clothing. And it is arguably anarchic to eat like this. Far better, in my mind, to sit down at a table, in a cafe say, than to walk around the street eating.

Mindful eating - focusing on food with minimal distractions- is very important, and allows us to treat food with respect.