Eating Publicly vs. Privately
While planning a wedding or a weekend Bar Mitzva, Sheva Brochos, or conference; you will be ordering plenty of gourmet meals with your caterer. If it’s a weekend, over Shabbos, you will probably start with a hospitality spread sometime Friday afternoon. From there the guests will barely get a chance to catch their breath before the Friday night Seudah (meal) will transpire. The gourmet 5 course meal will probably end with a scrumptious dessert, and be followed with a Vienesse table spread as well. And this is all just about one evening of the full weekend affair. Let’s not forget the coffee and cake in the morning, and the kiddush following the morning davening (prayers). At noon it’s time for the lunch meal, which is followed by the Afternoon tea room, and the late afternoon meal as well. Sounds like a lot of food for one 24 hour period.
Therefore, we get the question all the time. Is it really necessary to have food in the welcoming packages for our guests placed in their rooms? How much can one really eat? Now this depends a lot on the food eater’s personality. There are those party lovers that will come to your affair ready to cram all the food there is to feast upon. They may be the weight conscious type and starve all day or all week prior to your affair just to be able to enjoy the abundance. You may think it’s because they don’t have a weight issue or that they have no issues about their weight. Yet, there’s group B which may like good food, but won’t ever be caught indulging in public. That may be due to their lack of appetite when facing so much food at once. It can also be that they are too self conscious to eat publicly. They may or may not have a weight issue, yet they are concerned about their image and won’t gorge in front of other people.
So your answer may be that the reason you still need to have food prepared in the guestrooms is for the type B people to enjoy a hunger-free event!