"Don't eat with your fingers!"

Amazing, how this bit of common wisdom has been largely ignored, over recent years.  Go into any diner or casual eatery in your area and observe - really observe - how people manage to get the food (or whatever those morsels of fried batter pass for), into their mouths.  By and large, Americans have forgotten to use (and HOW TO use utensils).  Years ago, we were chastised at the table, for certain things like reaching across the table (instead of asking someone to pass that item), and for using our fingers to eat with.

I've often felt like a fool, watching others eat, but the two things I notice are that today's Americans rarely use utensils (which you can verify, by watching most TV commercials, for food (or what passes for it).  In these ads, folks around a table (home or restaurant) are all reaching for a "finger food," usually a collection of crispy, golden brown, fried batter nuggets, inside which is buried a small amount of something or other.  The eaters pick things up and either direct them mouthward or dip them in some glop, first.  (As you can probably tell by now, I have no particular fondness, for commercially fried, fast "food."  More on that, in another blog entry.)  To be fair, however, some items are very properly picked up and eaten with the fingers, among them hamburger/cheeseburgers, crudité items and pizza (which I happen to eat with knife and fork).

So where does the wisdom come in?  Well, in my generation parents and grandparents had been admonishing children at the table, to use utensils.  And not just because children tended to wipe their fingers on their clothes, but because eating with utensils was first the height of human development.  We had come a long way, after all.  Picking roots and berries, and then taking down game, we brought it to the fire (or the gathering), where it was torn apart or distributed with the hands.  We then invented utensils, which allowed us to both keep our linens clean AND slowed us down, so we weren't "wolfing" down our food.  Each bite required that we select a size morsel (or cut something larger into a bite size piece), then bring it to our mouths.  Each operation of the utensils gave us a small amount of time to talk, think and be more mindful of what we were eating (and how much).

When I think of millions of Americans chowing down on fried batter thingies, licking their fingers after eating ribs or never using utensils, it makes me wonder how much additional food these folks are eating, because they're not being more mindful.

"Don't eat with your fingers!" was pretty good wisdom.  And although there are times when we do - and can - it's best to use conventional Common Sense and stick to knife, fork and spoon.