It's not just noisy eating - I think most people find that unpleasant - but making a needless aural assault on other people's sense for what is basically an admittedly natural, though to me, a private/personal activity.
I don't recall having encountered the word 'misophonia' until I read it a few days ago, Xmas Eve, on the BBC News site about a woman who has suffered from this 'disorder' (as it's medically described) for a lifetime, and I thought "That's ME!" And looking it up, although the word covers negative reaction to a wide range of sounds, foremost among them is other people's eating. And all these decades I'd thought that I was if not unique (which would have been silly) but certainly quite rare. Now I find that it's rather more common than I'd assumed to be the case.
My own aversion depends not only on the particular sound being produced but whether or not I know that person, that combination setting up a particular reaction in myself which I find severely hard to tolerate, and I just have to move away outside earshot or I feel I'll go mad!
My most extreme reaction all my life has been to one of my brothers' eating, one who is 18 months younger than me, so he's now 78. We were very close as boys then suddenly, as though overnight, I couldn't help but hear that when he ate anything at all, he thudded his teeth together, top against bottom, whether he had something in his mouth or even after he'd swallowed it - and that sound in particular, that thud-thud-thud, just drove me crackers!. And now he still does it - at least he did when I last saw him 18 years ago at the funeral wake of another of my brothers. But that same in that direction irritation soon extended to every other member of my family, even though they made different sounds, it still sent shivers through me even if nothing like as deeply felt as that of my younger sibling. I've only ever met one other person who eats in that same way, someone I used to see quite regularly, being the boyfriend of one of my own best friends - the latter not seemingly troubled by sharing my difficulty. I could never myself have had a close friend who ate that way, let alone live with one - but, then, I've never been asked!
Apparently there is (as yet?) no known cure for this malady, though there is what's known as 'cognitive behavioural therapy' to deal with it by reducing the level of negative reaction to this particular stimulus. At my age it's a bit late in the day for me to explore whether something on those lines could make it for me easier to live with, though I don't rule it out entirely.
Generally, the noisiest of common foods must be apples and crisps ('chips' in U.S.A.) and should the occasion arise, or I was offered such, I would never eat them in company, being ultra-aware of the sounds I myself was making. I'm even still conscious of it having lived alone for 55 years. I do still consume a (small) packet of crisps daily, but I do try to keep the volume down - after all, my pussy-cats may not like it. 😊
I'll end by relating a dreadful experience I had some years back, my coming closer to being an actual murderer than I've ever been before or since......
It was in the 90s, a couple of years after the Channel Tunnel had opened, affording a rail link between London and Paris. I was returning to London - a packed train but I'd got a reserved (window) seat, so no problem there. I'd noticed that the adjacent aisle seat had also been reserved, but settling down with a paperback I didn't give it any more thought. Then she arrived. A what-you-might-call, a 'portly' youngish female, perhaps around 20, carrying a supermarket-type plasic bag full of....well, what I was about to find out. She plonked herself down, spreading herself over both armrests (but she was 'large'!) and straight away reached down and took out a large bag of crisps - the bag being about the same size of those which contain half-a-dozen small individual bags. The train had not started yet so there were no sounds other than people talking, and no buzz or hum from the train's movement itself. I made an inner 'groan' as she began chomping away - crunch, crunch, crunch - completely distracting me from my reading. I was reluctant to escape to somewhere else even if only temporarily, as she being on the 'large' side it would have meant a major upheaval only to be repeated on my return - no other visibly vacant seats to be seen which might be unaccounted for after late-comers had arrived. So anyway, I grinned (though not really) and bore it! By the time she'd finished the train was on the move. She then reached into her bag again and brought out one those giant plastic bottles of Pepsi. "Glug, glug, glug" she went - well, she did have an awful lot to wash down into her gullet. When that episode I thought must have been over, resuming my reading she was fumbling in her bag again and brought out - (don't laugh) - another giant bag of crisps! OMG! Clearly this creature was one of those who just could not keep still - she simply had to be doing something, and just my luck that her 'thing' happened to be to eat, eat, eat! My indignation was becoming harder and harder to contain, but I couldn't do anything other than continue to suffer in silence, albeit near to bursting. Chomp, crackle, chomp, crackle......it went on and on. I tried to console myself by thinking "Well, at least she's not speaking on a phone!" Coming out of the tunnel, entering England, she'd now finished her second (giant) packet - and what do you think she did? Yes, you guessed right. She got out her PHONE! - and for the next 30 mins at the very least, non-stop jabber, jabber, jabber - making it impossible for me to read. You can't not listen when there's someone a few inches away from you left lug-hole talking as if the whole coach needed to hear - and what's worse, everything she said was so inconsequential - as it so often is on these chats you can't help over-hearing when on public transport. Nothing that couldn't have waited. By now I was seething, my blood was boiling feeling like it could have exploded out of my ears. As we pulled in to Waterloo station (as was then London's final terminal point - now it's St Pancras station) I was trying to admire myself for restraining from committing a proper murder - a deserved killing by any means possible, only by the most convenient and quickest way possible, anything to bring an end to that prolonged verbal assault on my ears. One thing I do have to be grateful for, though - is that she didn't have an apple! That would really have sent me over the cliff edge, to face a prison life sentence - but it would have been well worth it!
And now - all the very best for 2026 to all you lovely people!
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