AIBU you don't have to automatically share food gifts?

[MaddyHatter]

Bit of a TAAT, but i want to tackle the idea that when you're given food as a gift.. chocolate, sweets...etc that there is this expectation that you should share them.

"I can't quite get past someone being given chocolates as a present and snaffling them up to their bedroom, not to be shared with anyone else" was said on another thread as an example

Why?

I never have.. they were bought for me, why should i share them with anyone else?

Why is there this belief that food given to you as a present ought to be shared amongst the people in the house? Why does the fact that its food turn someone elses present into a fair game free for all?

or even bullying their kids/spouses/friends into giving them some.

sorry, pressed paste too soon:

you are some kind (traditional nuclear family or variant thereof) of sociopath if you are not instinctively inclined to share tbh, though if you are not obliged to do so by any kind of rigid law; if you are a wholly independent solo entity you are under no obligation to share or be shared with, care or be cared about etc.

Food is different to other property, genuinely and for historical reasons going back thousands of years, or indeed probably millennia.

Food has always been a different type of "property".

Food has generally been a communal commodity for social groups of humans who are interdependent, far, far more so than any other commodity.

Food gifts are not the same as gifts of other items.

There is, in all honesty. no reason at all why food gifts would be private, and there are thousands of years of providence for food being different to other gifted items and for individuals in recipients of food gifts to view those food differently to non food gifts such as jewellery - the perishable nature of food is inevitably a part of that, bit thousands of years of evolutionary history and biology are too.

On the social history side it says a whole lot about a person and their deeply ingrained attitude to food - those who naturally incline to share food gifts see high status food gifts as a chance to be inclusive, those who naturally incline to hide high status food gifts away to consume alone and in private see high status food gifts as a way to mark their own alpha status or uniquely valuable individuality or in MN parlance special snowflake status . Certainly it is a normal human response to share high status, non essential, luxury food items with ones inner circle rather than hide in the bedroom and eat it in secret when nobody is looking...

However

MaddyHatter the thing is nobody should be told they have to share...

No child should be forced to share, ever... because that is not sharing

but

a household in which people hide food from one another and do not feel a natural inclination to share is fucked up. Normal families share automatically without being forced.

As soon as people start hiding and hoarding food the likelihood of other people stealing it increases

Where people within a family unit need to hide and hoard food from one another the family already have a deeply disordered attitude to food.

In mentally healthy households unless there is hoarding and desperate physical privation (any usually not even then) nobody thinks of stealing from their own nuclear family; it just is not a normal thought process, and where it happens it is highly likely that the thief is far from being solely to blame because normal families instinctively do not allow an imbalance to develop.

There is an eating disorder at work where family members hoard food and other family members steal it, and more than one eating disorder in a family is deeply, deeply telling of a fucked up family dynamic.

Hiding high status food in your room to eat alone is a fucked up thing to do.

Stealing a family member's food is too.

They are two sides of the same coin. People who cannot fathom stealing food from family members also cannot fathom hoarding it.

*and not any--- not even usually then

So OP can never enjoy an edible gift in private, because eating chocolate/whatever, where nobody can join in, for instance in the bath, is sociopathic? She should expect no autonomy in this whatsoever. And, were I to decide to give OP such a gift, I should presumably consider the whole family rather than the tastes of the OP?

Tripe.

Brecon OP can do what she wants. So can you. What you want to do is symptomatic of who you are. People who are cut off from others attach themselves to possessions. This attachment in turn crowds out social relationships.

But is it fair to write off the OP as "selfish" simply because they want to enjoy their gifts in peace without the expectation of having to give part of it up simply because it happens to be food and there are people around who expect them to fork it over? What sort of communist, dystopian nonsense is that?

Okay, I'll buy that people are going to think about you a certain kind of way if you choose not to share, but they're going to have to get over it. When you put this whole "society will shun you if you don't share" on a person, you're telling them that according to your rules, sharing ISN'T optional. And it is, no matter how many butthurt onlookers there happen to be.

OP, I'm with you. Share when you want to share. Don't share if you don't want to.

The people shaming and shunning OP for not sharing, well, if I'm honest I'd rather be around someone who has clear ideas about possession and boundaries (and therefore is likely to respect mine) than someone who is going to pout and whine and turn their nose up at me until I give them what they want, at the expense of my own lovely gift. Sod off with that, I say.

5more Thus, if dh is away on business, and at uni, and I decide to have an early night with a book and some chocolate, then that's allowable, but not if they are home? I buy dh stuff that is his, as I don't like it (haggis, or spicy olives for example), so he is under no compunction to share it, but he is allowed to eat my chocolate?

a sociopath? For not wanting to be bullied into sharing something gifted to me?

So the fact that i share the food i buy, cook it, serve it up and even often let my kids and spouse help themselves off my plate so they don't go hungry/without doesn't count?

The ONLY thing that does count towards calling me a sociopath is the fact that i don't want to feel i MUST give them one of my speciality fudge? Or a cup of my posh hot chocolate?

Yeah.. ok.

Any food item must be shared with the giver and other people first to make sure it's not poisoned, obviously.

More seriously, I wouldn't say it should be a free for all, but, yes, offer everyone some, within reason. It's called sharing good fortune. Not everything can be shared, but it is very selfish not to share anything that can be.

The others, though, should respect that it wasn't given to them and just take a small part and leave the rest to the gift recipient.

If someone is kind enough to offer me something, I always decline but show I'm grateful. It's a kind thing to offer and I think it's also a kind thing to decline.

In conclusion this entire thread can be summed up as;

"Joey doesn't share food!"

The middle ground of the sharing buffer zone is the best idea.

I think it depends on how you receive the gift.

If you get a lovely box of chocolates and say "oh how lovely my favourite I shalll save those to enjoy later" - absolutely fine.

If you get a lovely box of chocolates and proceed to sit there and stuff you face with them surrounded by other people then that is rude IMO.