Cultual relativism and table manners

When our family sits down to eat, we define the meal in front of us in any number of ways. Sometimes we eat food which is constantly being prepared by a person who moves from the kitchen to the table bringing momos or pancakes and finally eats after everyone else; sometimes we all sit down together to eat a three-course dinner. How we eat varies, too: with our right hands, with fork and knife, with chopsticks or chopsticks and a spoon.

When I was a child eating with my parents, dinner was highly ritualised. It was almost always prepared by my (long-suffering) mother, who cooked while everyone else sat and read, and then put out in various bowls to be served onto plates; if there was an animal to be carved up, that was my father’s job. Everyone sat down together, food was distributed, my mother picked up her fork and knife and began to eat, and then everyone else began. Each implement had a place; the arrangement of implements foretold what was to be eaten. Table talk was an art form, and still is. Small children were excluded from the table, because there were rules and they weren’t so easy for a fidgety young child to follow. The ritualised presentation of the food meant that there could be one set of rules. The Newar families I know well also have very strict food manners around comportment, gesture, speech and cleanliness, though they are far kinder and more inclusive for small children.

Raising our children, I have sometimes wanted them to appreciate the ritual of dinner as I learned it. There is almost no opportunity to stage the fully formalised dinners of my childhood, and our home is an unstable rift zone at the plate boundary of several cultures anyway. What the children have learned, though, is that there are multiple rule sets and each has its internal order as well as entrance and exit schemata. The entrance to a fork-and-knife dinner is me cooking all afternoon; the entrance to a rice meal is the sound and scent of the rice cooker gurbling away; and the communal effort that heralds momos consumes everyone long before the first momo emerges from a steamer. Sometimes leaving the table requires a formal departure: “may I be excused?”–and sometimes we just verify that everyone is well- fed, where ever they happen to be once we think that’s worth asking. It only becomes clear that all these scripts exist as the children begin to adapt, comment upon, or challenge them reflectively. Emily Post would despair, but we seem to thrive on this.