Have you seen the video doing the rounds online? A packed Tube carriage, somewhere in London’s subterranean maze. On one of the seats, in full view of her fellow passengers, a woman is calmly eating rice. With her fingers. From a plate. Balanced precariously on her lap.
It’s not a snack bar or a sandwich hastily grabbed on the go. It’s an entire meal. The kind one might enjoy at home, not on the Central line between Oxford Circus and Notting Hill. I nearly dropped my phone. My fingers itched — not to scroll away, but to sanitise.
Even more disturbing than the act itself was the response: or lack thereof. The man sitting next to her didn’t even look up. It was as though she were doing nothing more unusual than scrolling Instagram. Has London become so numb, so dulled by daily oddities, that full-on dining no longer warrants a reaction?
Make no mistake — this is not an isolated incident. It’s merely the latest in a growing trend: Tube eaters. The scourge of the Underground. We’ve all encountered them. The ones wolfing down pasties on the Bakerloo. The chicken munchers on the Jubilee. The fragrant curry container warriors of the Northern line.
And to be clear — it’s not about food shaming. Everyone’s got to eat. But there’s a time and a place. That place is not a rattling metal capsule beneath the city where the air tastes faintly of brake dust and despair.
Let’s start with the obvious: the Tube is filthy. It always has been. It always will be. It’s the price we pay for living in a city of nine million people who all need to get somewhere fast. The grime is legendary. A study from a few years back found that the Underground had air pollution levels up to 30 times higher than what’s legally permitted above ground. The air is so thick with iron-rich particles from the tracks that simply breathing in Zone 1 is basically an iron supplement.
Into this environment, someone decides to eat. To open a bag of crisps, or worse, unpack a container of leftover lasagne and fork it down between Euston and Warren Street. I’ve seen it all. One time, I watched a man peel a boiled egg while standing on a moving train. I’m still haunted.
This isn’t just about public hygiene — though that alone should be reason enough to call time on Tube meals. It’s about public decency. You wouldn’t chew noisily through your lunch at a funeral. You wouldn’t bring a tuna baguette to a job interview. Why, then, is it acceptable to crack open a pungent packet of chicken satay sticks next to someone trying to get to work without vomiting?
To those who say, “But I’m in a rush!” — we all are. It’s London. No one here is leisurely drifting from A to B. If we made exceptions every time someone had a busy day, we’d all be elbow-deep in hummus on the Piccadilly line.
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The truth is, post-Covid, many of us are more conscious of the shared spaces we occupy. The Tube is a communal space — one we already endure with remarkable grace and resignation. We don’t need the added horror of being hit in the nose by someone’s leftover tikka masala fumes at 8:15am.
So here’s the solution: ban it. Ban hot food, cold food, loud food, messy food. Ban snacks, ban nibbles. Ban finger rice. The only acceptable consumables should be water and perhaps a silent coffee — and even then, only if it’s securely lidded.
The Tube is not a food court. It’s not your kitchen. It’s not a makeshift dining room because Pret had a queue. It’s a shared, sweaty, semi-functioning transport system. Let’s keep it that way.
Leave your dinner at home — or, better yet, eat it above ground. For all our sakes.
