Food. You need it to live, and a lot of the time you need it right now. Another thing you often need to do is be someplace. Therein lies a conflict if you happen to live in a major metropolitan area (we’ll focus on New York City for the purposes of simplicity and also because it’s where most of us at this website are): You may need to eat while traveling. Sometimes eating on the train causes fights or viral spectacle, and sometimes it causes commute-upending track fires, according to the MTA. It’s a big city, the possibilities are endless. That is why many of us are here in the first place.
DNAinfo reports that the MTA is mulling a program to help subway riders determine which foods one should eat on the subway, in order to help prevent garbage-started track fires that are adding to the subway’s current delay issues. MTA chair Joe Lhota said the “education program” is currently being drafted and “and there have been a lot of recommendations about what foods are appropriate, what foods are not.” The DNAinfo piece concludes:
Regarding the food issue, Lhota said he recently saw a passenger on the 2 train get on and start eating Chinese food from a Styrofoam container filled with “a lot of rice.”
“Inevitably, the rice fell — it was all over the place,” he said.
Packaged items like protein bars, on the other hand, make less of a mess in the transit system.
“Some things work, some things don’t,” Lhota added.
A good rule of thumb is don’t eat rice on the goddamn subway! That’s a terrible way of inconveniencing your fellow straphangers and making them think they’re seeing maggots when they first spy your rice out of the corners of their little eyes. Here is some more good advice from Hamilton Nolan’s popular Gawker post “The Ten Worst People on the Subway”:
You want to eat a Snickers bar on the train? Fine. You want to stank up the entire subway car eating a huge styrofoam container of Kung Pao Chicken? That is rude. If the food you are eating is stank, do not eat it on the subway. Eat it before you get on. Eat it after you get off. But do not eat it while we are all stuck in this tiny confined space for the next half hour or so. A simple and effective rule we can all live with. (Homeless people can be exempt.)
It seems that experts agree: Bars are good, food that is probably sold with rice (or is rice) is bad. But what about other stuff?
A good rule of thumb is to limit your subway food to that which can be eaten by hand. In the United States, that kind of food tends to be less pungent than that which you cannot reasonably eat by hand. It is also less likely to make a mess, unless you’re one of those people who shovels handfuls of snackables like popcorn into your mouth, figuring that hitting the target 75 percent of the time ain’t bad. If you are a C student in the class of eating, I think you need to do better in general, not just on the subway.