Is saving food from the hotel buffet theft?

Last week, on a Swedish train somewhere between Linkoping and Mjolby, as I struggled to open a bag of cheesy snacks that was to serve as my lunch, my travel companions began unwrapping their own picnics. Some, like me, had made hasty and unappetizing purchases at the station. Others had carefully curated lunches, assembled earlier in the day from our hotel’s lavish breakfast buffet. Well-filled rolls, pieces of fruit, pastries. In they tucked.

Germans may be on the march at dawn, annexing sun loungers, but it’s the Brits who secrete breakfast goods

I was suddenly aware of a frisson of stance-taking rippling through our group. There were those who regarded buffet plundering as theft and those who defended it as plain common sense. Women were more likely to have taken food, but then women are generally more likely to make advance preparations for lunch. I noticed schisms even within families and between close friends. And then there was me, who had never before given the matter any thought, nor realized it was a thing people did.

It is, apparently, a very British habit. The Germans may be on the march at dawn, annexing sun loungers, and Italians may not have the faintest idea about queuing, but it’s the Brits who secrete breakfast goods about their person and spirit them away in order to economize on lunch.

So is it theft? Hardly. More a legal gray area. If, as a hotel guest, you have paid for breakfast, taking away a few items seems no more reprehensible than stuffing yourself silly at the trough (what I would describe as the Because It’s There school of eating). There’s something inherent in buffet catering that awakens the Inner Pig, as anyone who has eaten at Nero’s in Atlantic City can testify. But if taking food away isn’t strictly speaking theft, the sense I got from the disapprovers in my party was that it just wasn’t the done thing.

I then realized that the reason I’d been unaware of this British peccadillo is because it’s done so discreetly. With great sleight of hand, a breakfast roll is filled with ham and cheese, wrapped in a paper napkin and slid into a handbag. There’s scarcely any need to create a diversion, because your fellow diners are either at it themselves or too focused on their scrambled eggs.

Indisputably, hotels do have to contend with theft and we’re not talking about a bar of soap. A pen, notepad, tea bags, a little bottle of shampoo? Help yourself. Even a pair of those throwaway slippers. Knock yourself out. But towels, bathrobes, irons, kettles, batteries from TV remote controls, light bulbs, no. Light bulbs? It is kleptomania run riot, yet it does happen. Sometimes artwork disappears off the walls. In my long life I have yet to see anything on a hotel bedroom wall that I coveted, but there is no accounting for taste. I have heard of mattress thefts too. Filching a pocket-sprung kingsize is a heist so brazen it almost invites admiration. It would seem to require, at the very least, familiarity with the controls of a hotel freight lift plus the services of a getaway driver.

But back to the breakfast table. There is an argument, and I will make it, that hotel buffets offer obscene quantities of food, some of which will be thrown away at the end of breakfast service. If you have paid for breakfast but can’t manage anything more than a yogurt and a cup of coffee first thing, why not take a little something for elevenses? You are hardly depriving those trenchermen who go back for seconds and thirds. Nor are you making a fatal dent in the hotel’s bottom line. High thread-count sheets? Yes, theft. An apple and a Danish? No.

This being the case, why would I still hesitate to do it? Is it fear of being challenged? Is it a dread of appearing a cheapskate, or impoverished? Well, a bit of all of the above, and not helped by an awareness that the British abroad are still (and sometimes deservedly) objects of derision. British picnics, no matter how much food writers exhort to think outside the Tupperware box, are rarely déjeuner sur l’herbe. A sandwich, a sausage roll, anything will do. When on the move, Brits settle, as I did last week, for whatever the station concourse has to offer.

My companions, who had snaffled modest amounts of grub from the breakfast buffet, lunched better than I did. It is a lesson learnt and if nothing else, next time I’m breakfasting in an All You Can Eat hotel, I shall certainly be more observant of the behavior of my fellow guests. “Good morning, Walter. Is that a banana and a muffin secreted in your pants, or are you just pleased to see me?”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.