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Some food tastes better when you eat it with your hands.http://www.nst.com.my/Current_New...olumns/2142864/Article/index_html2008/01/27 DAVID LAVOIE: Appreciating 'the other' culture David Lavoie Email to friend Email to Friend Print article Print Article Share Some food tastes better when you eat it with your hands. Some food tastes better when you eat it with your hands. "DON'T eat with your hands!" my mother would snap, rapping my knuckles sharply with a wooden ladle. "Eat like a civilised person. Use a fork like you've been taught!" "Fingers before forks," my father would comment mildly, reaching across the table for another fresh bun from the heaping platter. What can I say? I grew up conflicted. I knew I was supposed to have good table manners, especially when "company" was present. My mother had taught me that. And good manners meant using a fork, a knife and a spoon. But it just felt good eating with my hands. How can a sandwich be eaten with a knife and fork? Or an apple? This all came to mind quite recently at a wedding we attended in Kedah. I watched beautifully dressed people, men on one side, women on the other, scooping up balls of rice, sauce and meat and popping them adroitly into their mouths, not a knife, fork or spoon in sight. It looked messy, but I could see the advantages. For one thing, when you eat with your hand rather than cutlery, at least you know that your eating utensil is clean. I've been in a few dodgy restaurants, both here and in North America, where I am not sure I would want to make that claim. For another, it's like eating off banana leaves. It's so easy to wash up afterwards! My fascination with the wedding guests eating with their hands doesn't mean I never pick up my food. I absolutely do. I've already mentioned sandwiches. Consider this list of foods popular in the West which we commonly eat with our hands: french fries, hot dogs, corn dogs, hamburgers, popcorn, pizza slices, fajitas, tacos, shawarma, onion rings, pretzels, cheese sticks, muffins, doughnuts, cupcakes, apples, oranges, etc. Sure, you can eat southern fried chicken with a knife and fork, but it tastes much better when you pick it up. So it's not eating with your hands that sometimes strikes foreigners as strange; it's what's being eaten that way. We would always use a knife and fork to eat rice, sauce and meat. As trivial as all this must seem, it provides an insight into a much larger issue. The truth is that all of us suffer from a sort of cultural tunnel vision when we look at how people of another culture do things. How we eat our food is a minor example of a much larger phenomenon. I once heard David Maybury-Lewis, anthropologist and ethnologist, speak of a concept he called "the other". We feel powerfully threatened, said Maybury-Lewis, by "the other", that person of a different culture whose behaviour and values are so completely different from our own, because he or she calls into question the basic premises of our own lives. If there are other ways of doing things, the question becomes: "Which way is best?" The easy answer is that the other's ways must, without question, be wrong. If eating with a knife and fork, as my mother would have insisted, is more civilised than eating with your hands, then the people who eat with utensils must be better. Do you see where this is going? There is an old proverb: "From little acorns mighty oaks do grow". Such small things as whether or not you touch your food when eating it become a much larger measure of tolerance and understanding. An elderly relative of mine asks the same question each time I return to Canada for the summer. "When," she demands, "are you going to come back from THAT place?" By "that place" she means Malaysia. She cannot conceive how happy I am in a country so different from where I was born, so "other". But learning to live with and value "the other" is much more critical now than any other time in our history as a species. We simply can no longer afford not to. The world has become too small; our lives are too intertwined. And after all, why does it matter how people eat? My wife tells an interesting story. Years ago, she was visiting a small village in Senegal. Her hosts, a Senegalese family, had been generous and extraordinarily hospitable. To show her appreciation, she decided to prepare a meal for the entire extended family. But what to cook? What would she do with the ingredients which were available in the small village? In a moment of inspiration, she stumbled on the answer: "Spaghetti with bolognaise sauce!" It's easy to prepare, very filling and capable of being spiced in a way which her hosts would find appetising. What she had not considered was the availability of forks to eat the meal. When she was ready, the family considered the huge pot of spaghetti thoughtfully and the problem of forks suddenly disappeared. They plunged their hands into the pot and ate huge handfuls of spaghetti with gusto. Relieved, she joined in. It was messy, tasty and thoroughly delightful. And why not? Did the spaghetti taste any differently? For the moment, she sat with her friends, joyfully sharing food. And there were no "others". David Lavoie is a retired Canadian teacher who now lives in Malaysia |
| Radiate_Truth |
Awesome!!!
I do however expect my guesses if their gonna eat with their hands or fingers to wash them first. Other than that... You won't found any or their are no formalities at my dining room table. |