Love Island producers have kept villa meal times and even light snacking off camera since its early seasons. Which means if – in some bizarre alternate reality – we were ever invited to join the dating series as an Islander, 99.9% of our footage would end up the cutting room floor and we'd end up on one of those dusty studio tables at the very back of the reunion.
As with most things, if you keep the goods from people, they just crave them more. As such, over the years, we've become more and more obsessed over Islanders' eating habits, food choices, and what is discussed at meal times as we almost never see this. It's that 'don't push the red button' analogy, isn't it? Of course we're going to be interested in one of the very few things not in our grasp when it comes to our Islanders and their day-to-day.
Saying all that, for series 9, we did notice from some of the early episodes that more and more scenes of Islanders eating and drinking ended up in the final edit – still no filmed lunches or dinners, but it's a start; a gentle, necessary reminder that these people are, in fact, human.
As such, we get painfully excited whenever Islanders reveal villa food tea in interviews or on their socials and dedicate entire articles to it – especially if they're divulging their favourite villa meals (because we still have no idea what LI catering looks like, in case we haven't hammered that home hard enough already).
This series, we've already been told that Anna-May Robey thought the villa food was "bland" and Zara Deniz Lackenby-Brown was OBSESSED with the avocado-themed breakfasts.
But this week, Love Island finalist Tanya Manhenga piped in on the food chat by sharing her fave villa meal – well, snacks – with her hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram. When asked in an Instagram Q&A, "Favourite snack in the vila?", Tanya replied, "I always had crisps, biltong and noodles."
Hopefully not together... actually, maybe 😋.
Obviously we never saw our Tanya chowing down on the local delicacies because heaven forbid, but we like her style.
And as yummy as Tanya's grub go-tos sound, they don't quite beat the meal that Love Island 2022 finalist Tasha Ghouri admitted to eating every single day in last year's villa – "ham and cheese toasties with BBQ sauce". Nor do they beat Lana Jenkins' alleged "Super Noodle sandwich". Gold star choice them.