Notice Concerning Meeting Snack Concealment
Working from home has eliminated the social friction of eating during meetings. The social fiction that we are not eating during meetings remains intact.
Notice Concerning Meeting Snack Concealment An Observational Essay, Submitted Without Apology
The Situation
A video meeting is in progress. There are six participants. Four of them are eating. None of them are visible eating.
The snacks are positioned below the camera frame, on laps, in desk drawers that have been pulled open to a precise angle, or behind coffee mugs that are technically large enough to block the relevant portion of the face.
The meeting continues.
Historical Context
In the office, eating during meetings was discouraged by proximity. Colleagues could see the food. They could smell it. The person eating was known to be eating. This created social friction that suppressed eating.
Remote work eliminated proximity. It did not eliminate the social norm. The norm remains. Only the enforcement mechanism has been removed.
The Concealment Apparatus
Participants have developed a sophisticated set of techniques for eating during video meetings while appearing not to eat during video meetings. These techniques include: eating only during moments when the speaker is someone other than yourself, muting before chewing and unmuting immediately after, selecting foods with minimal crunch profiles, and framing the camera such that the hands are below the visible area.
The sophistication of these techniques is not proportional to the necessity of concealing the eating. Concealment is performed because the norm requires it, not because discovery would produce consequences.
The Absurd Rule
Several organizations have issued formal guidance on video meeting conduct that includes language about eating during calls. The language recommends against it. The guidance was written in 2020 and has not been revised.
Compliance with this guidance is zero percent. Nobody has been sanctioned.
What Everyone Knows
Everyone can hear chewing. Nobody mentions the chewing. The meeting proceeds.
The social contract governing this arrangement is never stated because stating it would require acknowledging the chewing, which would require acknowledging that everyone has been eating, which would require acknowledging that the guidance has been ignored, which would require someone to decide whether to enforce the guidance, which nobody wants to do.
The Structural Contradiction
The guidance exists to communicate professional standards. The guidance is ignored by everyone including the people who wrote it. The standard is therefore not the guidance but the behavior, which is that eating during meetings is acceptable as long as nobody calls it eating during meetings.
The camera is on. The snack is off-screen. This arrangement satisfies everyone, including the snack.
What Remains
The norm persists because it provides a useful fiction. The fiction is that meetings are a formal context requiring the full attention of the body, not merely the face. Nobody believes this. Everyone performs it.
This is how most professional norms work.