Food and drink have no place on my gaming table, full stop. Greasy fingers and matt varnish don't mix socially. We take a pizza break for lunch, than it's scrubbing up and back to the table.
There's usually a bit of space at the ends of the table to keep various game detritus. Any other available table surfaces in the room are for drinks or cats.
This being Tokyo, I'm
extremely fortunate just to have a room of my own for a painting desk, books and figures, and a large living room (by big city standards) with space enough for a decently-sized gaming table. Most others here have young children, so setting aside gaming space is not really an option for them.
Yes, we all know that some of you have dedicated gaming rooms with massive tables, oodles of bookshelves and cabinets, and walls festooned with military prints and framed fragments of army-issue underwear from Waterloo. But I prefer this to be a hobby for me, not an interior decoration statement. And I'd very much prefer to preserve my marriage...

Bottom line, I constantly need to make the best use of what little space I have available. So within reason, and outside of convention games, I've nothing against a few dice, measuring tapes, or even a rulebook on the table in the midst of combat.
These are all tools of the trade in a dynamic hobby; I'm a wargamer, not a model railroader or static diorama builder.
With some game systems we need dice on the table anyway, to track orders or casualties. Doesn't bother us in the slightest. We may get around to making terrained diceholders one of these days, just to move them around the table more easily. But with all the painting we need to do first, it's not a priority.
For disorder markers in our Black Powder games, we use extra paper flags mounted on terrained washers. Not a big fan of MDF printed order markers; I find dice less obtrusive.




