Person Says Their Roommates Kept Eating Their Food — So They Started Tallying Every Single Thing That Disappeared
A woman says she tried talking calmly, labeling her groceries, and asking her roommates to stop taking her food. When none of that worked, she put a tally sheet on the fridge and started counting every time something disappeared.
In a Reddit post, the poster explained that she was 18 and living in a shared house with two friends, both also 18. One roommate had lived with other people before, but the poster and the other roommate were new to shared housing.
At first, the issue seemed small enough to fix with a simple conversation.
The poster noticed someone had been using her butter. That might sound minor, but she explained that hers was non-dairy butter because of a dietary requirement. Her roommates both used regular dairy butter, which meant whoever took hers was not doing it because there was nothing else available.
She asked both roommates to please ask before using her food. Both denied touching it, but they agreed that they would ask in the future.
Then the same thing kept happening.
The house eventually sat down and had a full conversation about eating other people’s food. Everyone agreed that they should only eat what they bought for themselves. It was not complicated. Nobody wanted their groceries disappearing, and the agreement was supposed to settle the matter.
But the poster said her food kept being used or eaten anyway.
After multiple conversations, the roommates started labeling their food to avoid confusion. That should have taken away the obvious excuse. If food had someone’s name on it, there was no reason to assume it was fair game.
Still, the poster kept finding her food missing.
The situation finally hit a breaking point after her sister baked cookies for her to bring home. The poster admitted she had not labeled the container, but she did not think she needed to. The cookies were homemade, and to her, that made it obvious they belonged to someone specific. Even if a roommate did not know they were hers, the poster said they should have known the cookies were not theirs.
Then she came home from work and found the last cookie gone.
The empty container was left on the bench.
That detail made it worse. Someone did not just take the cookie. They finished the container and left the evidence sitting there like nothing had happened.
The poster asked both roommates if they had eaten it. Both denied it. To her, that meant one of them was lying again.
She confronted them, saying it was ridiculous that someone was taking her food and then lying about it. She told them it made her feel like she was living with children who did not understand boundaries.
After that outburst, she thought maybe the message had finally landed.
It had not.
Soon after, she found her non-dairy butter had been used again. There was a perfectly good tub of dairy butter in the fridge, so whoever used hers had their own option. That made the poster feel like this was not a mistake anymore. It was either carelessness, entitlement, or someone deliberately ignoring her.
At that point, she said she was sick of her food being eaten without permission and then having to deal with people lying when confronted.
So she stuck a list on the fridge and started tallying every time her food was taken.
She said she genuinely did not know what else to do. Asking nicely had not worked. Group conversations had not worked. Labeling food had not worked. Getting upset had not worked. The tally was petty, maybe, but she felt like she had run out of better options.
Commenters mostly sided with the poster and said she was not wrong for being upset. Many said the issue was not only the food but the lying. Missing butter and cookies might sound small on paper, but living with someone who repeatedly denies taking your things can make a home feel tense fast.
Several people told her not to tamper with food to catch the culprit, even though some joked about making something spicy or using laxatives. Others quickly warned that messing with food could be dangerous or legally risky, even if it was technically her own food.
A lot of commenters suggested practical fixes instead. Some said she should get a mini fridge for her room or a lockbox for the shared fridge. Others told her to keep shelf-stable snacks and special food in her bedroom, especially anything tied to a dietary need.
Some people wondered if another person might be coming over and eating the food without realizing it belonged to her. But others pushed back, pointing out that the repeated denials made it feel like at least one roommate knew exactly what was happening.
A few commenters said the tally might not fix anything and could even make the food thief more determined to keep going. But even then, they understood why the poster had reached that point. One commenter put it simply: she had tried talking like an adult several times, and someone in the house still would not act like one.
The Reddit judgment landed firmly in the poster’s favor.
By the end, the missing food had become much bigger than butter or cookies. It was about being ignored in your own home, watching small boundaries get crossed over and over, and realizing that one of the people you live with would rather lie than leave your groceries alone.
