Yikes. I had a "disagreement" with my artist husband over something like this. I caught him eating cereal RIGHT OVER my Singer Featherweight and the project I was working on at the time. I gently asked (or maybe screamed...it's hard to remember at the moment) that he eat somewhere else, and he basically said:
"Why? I'm not going to spill."
To which I had to remind him that he would hate it if I ate food over his sketchbooks or his Wacom Tablet. He finally conceded the point that maybe, just maybe, it wasn't worth tempting fate near something that was so important to me.