“You know you want to kill me, or at least you want someone dead,” I say out loud. In return, I get the blank stare and weighted pause that can only come from a dinner date going horribly wrong. You see, my companion had left her chopsticks directly upright in a bowl of otherwise perfectly good noodles. This is an enormous faux pas in the chopstick-using world for a pair of upright chopsticks resembles joss (incense sticks in Anglicized Chinese) in a bowl, which is exactly what they use to commemorate their dead ancestors in this part of the world. So I was my date’s dead ancestor, which of course didn’t bode well for the rest of the relationship.
It could be worse I suppose. There’s a way to serve fish in Japan that is exclusively reserved for a Samurai prior to seppuku (the act of ritual suicide). The renowned director Akira Kurosawa complained bitterly that his wife, who was not of a noble family like himself, did it constantly. Mental note: if the opportunity ever presents itself, do not marry Akira Kurosawa’s ex-wife, she takes passive aggressive behaviour to a new culinary level.
Yet it’s not all death and doom when it comes to food etiquette, sometimes it is simply gross. Like the first time an Afghan or an Indian (or even a Saudi for that matter) explains why eating with your hands adds to the experience, but only with the right hand. For someone raised with a socialisation of cutlery culture it took me some time to understand that while the left hand meant for me correctly holding a fork, for my Middle Eastern and South East Asian colleagues, it meant toilet paper. Interestingly enough, once explained, I learnt just as fast to respect that little preference at the dinner table.
I was brought up by a proper English household, where you’re drilled into never putting your elbows on the table, never chewing with your mouth open and only ever starting with the cutlery furthest from the plate before working your way inwards. Then, when you finish your meal, you must place your knife and folk together, with the fork’s prongs facing upwards. On the rare occasion that I asked why we were a little more ‘strict’ at meals than other families I was sternly told, “So you know how to act if the Queen ever comes to supper”. Interestingly enough, she never did come and to be honest, I never found a scrap of evidence that my family had a standing invitation with her. Got to give to mum, she’s definitely an optimist.
I am thankful for that upbringing though. Etiquette, like manners, really does maketh the man and I have been raised to absorb the nuances of etiquette with a discretion and politeness that approaches the absurd. Just think about the commandment, ‘one must place one’s peas on the back of one’s fork.’ But have you seen a fork?! Every other part of it, whether the pointy bits, the curved bit, even the damn flat handle, is better suited to dealing with those pesky little escape artist but no, we are clearly instructed to use the smooth convex surface. (Tip: never underestimate how much mashed potato can help stick those buggers to the metal.)
That being said, I would have appreciated a bit more practice on how normal people eat as I travelled the world. Sure in Asia and Europe, with their refined, almost ritualistic, approach to eating, the experience of dining was a pleasure. I still relish in tapping my fingers when I receive Chinese tea, to the shock - and admiration - of my hosts. But my greatest culture shock was in the US of A.
Perhaps it is their colonial rebel history, or perhaps it is their abundance of everything, or more likely, they’re evil table monsters that need to be exorcised from existence. And don’t get me started with their mangled dining language - entrée has always been and will always be the earlier part of a meal, not the main bloody course. Or the fact that they are vaguely terrified of raw food, or anything that’s not clearly identifiable. But their greatest food crime, by far, is the way that they cut each piece of food up, with the knife, in the wrong hand, and then place the knife down and proceed to scoop, nay shovel, the assorted baby mash with a fork into their mouth. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I liken this activity to the genocide of all that is good and delicate in the act of dining.
I may have mellowed in my old age, and I have learnt to appreciate and adopt many a custom (with the obvious exception of the act against humanity that is the American butchery of a meal). I rather pride myself on understanding that what is considered food is really a cultural construct. The Cantonese, for instance, are extremely fussy about it, only eating living things that have ‘their back to the sky’ – i.e. pretty much every animal that exists. I once enjoyed a sour-faced Brit girl complaining about people eating dogs, until the very handsome Swiss gentleman sitting next to her at the bar, who she had been trying to impress, casually mentioned that it was still quite normal in some eastern Cantons.
Still, I am occasionally flummoxed by the rationales some people use to explain a delicacy. At a Scandinavian barbecue, a Norwegian guest proudly handed me a grilled piece of whale. “Is it ok to eat whale?” I asked. “They’re the rats of the sea” he replied. Does that really make it any better?
