5 Things About Chinese Dining Etiquette That Will SHOCK YOU

Don't be that guy.

Imagine enjoying dinner with a friend, when she suddenly reaches under the table and hauls out a tombstone. (Not the pizza.) She holds the mossy granite slab high, and then brings it crashing down on the table, shattering tableware and your grip on reality in equal measure. After you get past your friend’s improbable strength, and come to grips with reality’s cartoonish new rules, you’d probably be a bit offended. Slamming a grave marker onto the table, mid-dinner, is rude.

This is essentially what you’re doing if you impale your rice bowl with your chopsticks while dining with someone from China or Japan. In some Asian countries, it is a common funeral practice to thrust incense into a bowl of rice vertically and place it before the deceased. So casually stowing your chopsticks in your rice vertically evokes the inevitable end of all life, and the sadness we feel at the passing of those we love. This might be the definition of a buzzkill.

Culturally-specific dining etiquette can seem trivial, considering how our own (American) dining etiquette has eroded in the last few decades. (No, I’m not old enough to have witnessed the decline, but I read sometimes—usually while eating alone and dripping my food onto the book. I’m popular with libraries.)

But realizing why certain table habits are taboo or frowned-upon in other cultures has advantages. Doing as they do in Rome conveys that you are a respectful cultural participant, and not an entitled ignorant tourist. In an increasingly homogenous world culture, observing local dining customs connects you to centuries of tradition; it may bring out joys of dining heretofore unrevealed to you. Most crucially, it elevates you among your companions, making you seem intelligent, well-traveled, and sensitive. (I’m trying to imply this, but I might as well spell it out: always, always take first dates to ethnic restaurants and observe the associated traditional dining customs meticulously, but don’t make a big production of it, so you don’t seem like you’re trying too hard.) Lastly, the wait staff and cooks at ethnic restaurants notice when people take care to respect their traditions. This applies whether you’re across the world or across town. People (and especially immigrants) in the foodservice industry may not always receive the respect they deserve, believe it or not. Demonstrating respect and knowledge of their culture is a great way to become an adored regular and seem really cool. 

This post will be the first in a series exploring world dining etiquette. I'll cover every country in the world*, in order of population.

 Let's take a look at some Chinese dining etiquette rules through the lens of cultural relativity:

Would you hold the door open for a teenager, only to let it close in an elderly lady’s face? When presenting a decoratively-prepared Chinese dish, you should place it “upright” before the oldest or most important guest. This presentation acknowledges their special place at the table, as does allowing them to begin eating first. Make sure that stuffed duck sculpted into the likeness of George Clooney (circa 1994) is properly oriented. (Clooney should be winking at your grandma.)

Would you interrupt Christmas dinner by shouting, “Alms for the poor!” and outstretching your hand to aunt Gladys? Try to prevent incidental percussive contact between your chopsticks and any bowls or glassware. In China, this is traditionally associated with begging for food on the street.

Would you cock your fist back at uncle Ted to compel him to pass the potatoes? No more should you use your chopstick as an indicator or pointer at the table. According to traditional Chinese dining etiquette, chopstick pointing seems accusatory and brash. Does that seem silly? Well, shaking hands, for instance, is an antiquated nonsense gesture that many people do every day without question. Chopsticks predate handshakes by about 1500 years, and Western civilization by a lot more. Chopstick rules may not be set in stone, but they originate from the time when people actually set rules in stone.

Would you ladle out a dripping handful of soup during a business lunch? No? Why, what’s the big deal? You’re the same person, eating the same food you would with a spoon. Obviously, your prospective business associates might consider such behavior indicative of deeper problems. Nor should you suck on the end of your chopsticks. It may seem arbitrary, but it’s rude. Just like that unfair soup rule.

Would you go to Paris and spend the entire time watching TV in your hotel room? Nor should you order chop suey. While this is obviously not rude, it just makes you look like the culinary dabbler that you are. If you have a taste for chop suey, I suppose I can’t stop you. (It’s pretty good. In fact, I really like it.) But it’s the Big Mac of Chinese cuisine. Chinese people poking fun at their fellow countrymen for losing touch with their roots tell them they are “going chop suey.” The noodle dish is barely over 100 years old, and was invented in America.

This should get you started. Once you’ve completed chopsticks etiquette training and Elder Respect 101, we’ll visit Chinese Food Customs 201, where you’ll learn how to properly announce the birth of your son using boiled red eggs. 

*Every country that I feel like covering.

What Villains Eat

Frankenstein’s monster is in great shape, considering. Building muscle mass as a vegan requires care and planning. And working individual muscle groups is especially difficult if your muscle groups are from different individuals. Frankenstein's monster is straight up-ripped for a reanimated vegan. He’s also not real, so this may not be a good model of health to pursue. But it did get me thinking about what villains eat.

Before you get all professorial on me—I know the doctor is “the real monster in Frankenstein.” The monster seems to be a fine fellow, generally. He’s a sensitive sort, and seemingly an ideological vegetarian. I like him, and so did his creator. A little insight into Mary Shelley’s era tells us how much. The iconic monster’s abstinence from meat was likely a product of Shelly’s own “radical inclinations.” In 1818, vegetarianism was just finding purchase in circles where reading a lot and eating salad were “totally extreme.” Vegetarianism was revolutionarily weird, decried by the conservative establishment, and a crucial part of Shelley’s countercultural scene. In A Vindication of a Natural Diet, Mary’s husband Percy Shelley asserted that a vegetarian citizenry would not have "lent their brutal suffrage to the proscription-list of Robespierre." (Maximilien de Robespierre was a politician during the French Revolution... although calling Robespierre a "politician" is like calling Sauron's orcs "a group of disgruntled laborers.") So the monster’s vegetarianism brands him as the Good Guy, according to his creator.

This fact of the monster’s (invented) diet reminds me: the “villains” to which I refer are not real. So investigating their dietary choices requires oscillating between two (sometimes conflicting) judgemental paradigms: 1) Assessing villains as real people/creatures, subject to the logic and morality of the fictional universes they occupy, and 2) Assessing villains as constructs/pieces of art/folklore.

 As constructs, villains are often drawn with broad strokes. While a hero may have a long list of defining traits, exploits, powers, and the all-important tragic flaw, villains are usually simplistic, out of narrative utility. Villains, in the classic sense, have no analogue to the “tragic flaw,” no “fortunate virtue.” They do not necessitate having any redeemable facets, incidental interests, or defining backstories. Surely many villains do have these things, and I’d argue the most memorable ones all do. But these ancillary facets are part of the villain’s cover letter, not his resumé.

And yet, within the logic of any story, all villains must eat. They may eat caviar, or plankton, or simply worlds, but eat they must. Many of our classic villains prefer the most cunning prey imaginable—that of mankind. If protagonists are proxies for the reader/viewer’s identity, or vessels into which we pour our perspective, then villains are the opposite. They are resistance and obstacle made flesh. They are the antithesis of our most lauded ideals. The villain is an avatar of all that is other. If one harkens back to humanity’s earliest days, our chief concerns were a scant few: eat, make more of us, don’t get eaten. The fact that so many villains enjoy humanity as their dish of choice should not be surprising. What is a more instinctual threat than something higher up in the food chain?

Tigers are apex predators, but few would consider tigers immoral. They exist outside morality, and therefore outside “villainy.” But they are cunning, lethal, and have aims that may interfere with yours, were you occupying the same room. But we don’t blame the tiger, even if it invites questions about its fearful symmetry. If said tiger prowled along the periphery of civilization, picking off stragglers and livestock, we may kill it, but we would not condemn it. After all, look at its claws and jaws; It’s doing what comes naturally.

This is what makes judging the English language’s oldest villain difficult. Grendel, of Beowulf fame, is a bipedal beast who generally stalks vikings and eats them. The vikings outsource some muscle in the form of the Geats, who are basically like vikings who have been exposed to gamma rays. Beowulf, the Geats' leader, confronts Grendel and (spoiler alert) tears off Grendel’s arm. Though my knowledge of Old English is...rusty, I don’t believe Beowulf says, “Disarmed!” or “Need a hand, Grendel?” or anything like that. A wasted opportunity. But Beowulf does make a point of facing Grendel unarmed, since Grendel is unarmed (especially later! Tee-hee). This is a sort of chivalric honor that one would only extend a fellow warrior; concerns regarding “fair fighting” would not apply when fighting a tiger, for instance. So Beowulf, ultimately, sees Grendel as more man than beast.

Physically, though, Grendel falls firmly into the beast camp. Scales, claws, enormity—he’s rocking the beast style full-on. He is clearly designed with the bloodiest sort of life in mind. Eating vikings, AKA “evil,” chose him, not the other way around. Aims that conflict with humankind’s are intrinsically “evil,” since we made up the word and get to decide its meaning. We do not condemn the tiger. But we might if it walked upright. We would if it had the vocabulary of a five-year old, despite the case the claws make.

So the English language’s first villain remains a unique and compelling entry among those villains who feed on man, if only due to reasons of imperfect taxonomy.

"What exactly makes a mimosa a 'girly drink?'"

Dexter, of the abysmally-concluded Showtime series, is almost Grendel. He is compelled by a nature incomprehensible to most people. But, unlike Grendel, his sociopathic escapades serve no purpose—they do not put food on his table. His meal of choice is steak, as rare and bloody as possible. This steak can help us cast Dexter as a complex apex predator, or we can see bloody steak as a predictable, pat choice made by a writer, only meant to induce a smile. The same could not be said of his Smith and Wesson kitchen bar stool, which distracts from the scenes in which it's framed. But it still must take a back seat (see what I did there?) to food when it comes to insane relationships between nefarious characters and recognizable brands.

While it may be laughable that James Bond would ever use a low-rent paperweight like the Sony Ericsson C902 issued by MI6, it’s nowhere near as mind-shattering as watching the Joker shill for Snickers in this (obviously not American) commercial.

I suppose, when you’re selling food, there’s (almost) no such thing as bad publicity. (Almost. The film Se7en (1995) probably didn’t move a lot of spaghetti sauce.) At first, it seems that the rule regarding “embedded advertising” is simply that your food must be promoted by a character that is charismatic, powerful, or hip; said character’s moral alignment is simply not part of the equation. That seems true, but it’s not. It turns out that context is hardly even a factor in product placement.

You know how, about thirteen minutes into Fritz Lang’s 1931 classic M, you’re simultaneously feeling vexed about the the child murderer at large, but also inexplicably craving the fresh, long-lasting taste of a good spearmint gum? That’s because there’s a big Wrigley banner stretched over the action. Because nothing says “fresh” like a mob frantic about a child’s disappearance. (If you watch this scene without subtitles, and don’t speak German, it looks like you’re watching the most volatile product rollout in the world. There’s a guy who keeps pointing at the Wrigley banner and shouting. He probably just quit smoking. Good for him.)  

So what we learn about what some villains eat is that they eat what they’re told, which not only drains their mystique, but renders a philosophical inquiry about their culinary habits empty.  

At least we can mock icons of darkness as they become shills and spokesmen for fast food. I can imagine a snarky entertainment show quipping, “For a CEO of sorts, Darth Vader’s ‘golden parachute’ was pretty meager. Gorbachev selling Pizza Hut is the pinnacle of integrity compared to these Dark Side burgers.”

Television and movies create a sort of shotgun wedding between art and commerce. Product placement, both as intentional mechanism of advertising, and as incidental prop, can color a story’s mood or tell us about a character’s sympathies. But are villain's culinary predilections ever telling in an era of inescapable advertising?

While Vader is certainly a villain (he might be the villain of 20th century pop culture), his 11th hour redemption and complex, if poorly expanded-upon, backstory contains elements of the “anti-hero.” Vader being an ultra-popular villain is no accident—it’s due to his anti-hero nature. As soon as people realized that anti-heroes are like heroes, except interesting, that’s all we got on cable serial dramas. For instance:

Don Draper (Mad Men); Walter White (Breaking Bad); Tony Soprano (The Sopranos); Nucky Thompson (Boardwalk Empire); Ray Donovan (Ray Donovan); Frank Underwood (House of Cards); Everyone (Deadwood); Everyone (Rome); Omar Little, and also Everyone Else (The Wire).

The moral ambiguity in cable dramas is fascinating from a culinary perspective, because anti-heroes actually eat.  Since they are not strictly villains, and we spend lots of time with them, we get to see more of the minutiae of their lives, more humanizing and incidental choices they make. Their food selections are less iconic and more “real.” But since fiction isn’t real, and television isn’t real life, these are still choices that someone else is making. There is no “default setting.” Someone still has to decide that Jack Torrance wants Triscuits and not Oreos. (Is Jack Torrance not the anti-hero of The Shining? Huh… well, you’re entitled to your opinion.)

This new breed of anti-hero and likable villain is so far from the archetype of Snidely Whiplash, and all his mustache-twirling predecessors, that we find their eating choices simply natural consequences of their era and environment. Avon Barksdale is a great BBQ chef, Augustus Caesar eats stuffed quail. Such is the fictional culinary landscape as the stories we tell ourselves tend toward authenticity. Meanwhile, the cackling top-hatted villain of antiquity is left to survive via photosynthesis.

I suppose it's all right if we can’t pinpoint what Snidely Whiplash ate, since we have Daniel Plainview. Besides an almost psychotic enthusiasm for milkshakes, the oil man of There Will Be Blood (2007) favors (again) steak and whiskey. As a hyper-capitalist caricature, Plainview is a sort of apex predator, and this is reinforced by his choice of meal. I struggle to think of a better nexus between hyper-masculine predation and affluence than steak and whiskey.

And affluence is a big part of modern villainy. You don’t see a lot of paupers/homeless people with top hats and waxed mustaches. (I don’t mean to assume too much about your life, dear reader.) The classic villain archetype bears an uncanny resemblance to the classic robber baron/railroad magnate/ rich guy operating the levers of the machine in which you are simply a cog. Lex Luthor, King Joffrey, and Monty Burns all enjoy things delivered on silver platters. And since we’ve absorbed this socio-economic projection of villainy into our cultural mythology, the food choices of our classic villain template tend toward caviar and away from a nice fruit salad.

This is ironic when considering the origin of the word “villain” itself. If you were tilling the soil for your livelihood during the Dark Ages, you would be doing so on a farming compound, or villa, naturally. This would make you a “farmhand,” or vilain, in the Old French, from the Late Latin villanus. This meant that you were not a knight, not bound by the strictures of chivalry, and therefore likely to commit heinous, villainous acts. (My experience with moderns farmers implies that this is no longer much of a concern.)

So “villainy,” as an etymological construct, is intrinsically bound up with fresh, local, organic produce. While this doesn’t mean that you should wear a stab-vest in the produce section of Foods For Living, it’s worth noting how the concept of "villainy" was historically sanctioned by the affluent, until an emerging literate middle class decided to vilify them through fiction. These distinctions may have been obliterated by the explosion of fictional perspectives in every medium over the last hundred years, but the underlying class tensions are (obviously) going nowhere. (Many thanks to Aerosmith for reminding us.)

It makes me wonder: On what shall tomorrow’s villains dine? What will that say about their creators? 

A SCIENCE Info Table at Article's End

 

Stimulus                  Your Feelings      A Psychopath's Feelings

Getting Promoted          Excited, proud     Apathetic, detached

Making a successful 

joke                      Proud              Apathetic, detached

Having a child            Grateful, proud, 

                          joyous             Apathetic, detached

Doing something           Horrified,         Really pumped

violently psychotic       regretful,                  

                          disoriented

Eating some great food    Content,           Content, stimulated

                          stimulated on      on a basic visceral

                          a basic visceral   level                                          level               

                                                             

How to Eat Your Salad Historically

1) Before you eat your salad, or dismiss it for its more seasonably appealing cousin, the soup, please consider what it’s been through.

Get to know it a bit. This is your salad. There are many like it, but this one is yours. Whether it’s a kaleidoscope of peppers and peaches, or the simple poetry of a Caesar, your salad has spanned oceans and millennia (and may have suffered some litigation in East Texas, which we’ll get to) to sit humbly beside your entrée. Lose yourself in the majesty. Tears are permissible.

In fact, if you cry into your salad, it might feel right at home. Your salad’s ancient ancestors were wet, salty affairs. A salad under Caesar would have been a selection of pickled vegetables, covered in oil and/or vinegar, with generous salt, as wealth allowed. (Caesar’s salads were not Caesar salads. In fact, the Caesars of old had very little in common with the salad’s namesake, the former being emperors, and the latter being an Italian chef who lived in Tijuana during the Roaring Twenties.)

The Romans liked their salad, though they probably “borrowed” the idea from the Greeks, as they were fond of doing. (See also: religion, clothing, democracy, military strategy.) While the “idea” for the modern salad may belong to Greece, it was the Roman designation, the Vulgar Latin herba salata, meaning “salted herbs,” that would eventually evolve into our word “salad.” (Greece does get credit for the word “idea,” and even the idea of an idea, but who’s keeping score?) Salad found advocacy in the wise among both societies, with the Greek Hippocrates and the Roman Galen, some five hundred years later, each lauding the virtues of salad as both bowel cleanser and palette cleanser. There aren’t many things that share that double distinction, so three cheers for salad.

Mind you, the ancient Greeks liked their salad, and they were, of course, Greek, but they were not eating what we would call “Greek salad” in 400 BC. “Greek salads” wouldn’t come into play until the 20th century, where they were introduced in… the United States. Our Greek salads, in their charmingly American way, break all the rules, so if you want beets in your salad, you’re better off going to Greektown than Greece. A modern Greek may attack you if you go anywhere near his Horiatiki (Greek “peasant” or “rustic” salad) with beets and feta cheese.

Speaking of wanton violence, Christopher Columbus has become an increasingly polarizing figure in recent years, as our framing of history evolves. But whether you see him as a bold adventurer and emissary of civilization or an opportunistic murderer, it’s hard to argue with his contribution to the modern salad. In short, he’s given credit for bringing home the lettuce and cucumbers, and taking back the tomatoes. (Although Hernán Cortés also brought back tomatoes when he was finished slaughtering the Aztecs.) Thus were the native peoples of North America able to enjoy the cucumber, though that may be a poor consolation prize.

Esteem for the cuke has varied widely among peoples. (Folk etymology tells us that our word, “cucumber,” is a mutation of the word “cowcumber,” so called because farmers thought that the vegetable was most suited to feeding cows. Real, non-folk etymology tells us that the word’s origin is Latin. Nevertheless, the “cowcumber” had a less-than-spotless reputation for centuries, likely due to its tendency to spoil quickly.)

Meanwhile, the tomato became huge in Europe; the pomi d’oro put North America on the (totally inaccurate) map. Italy, as you may have gathered, fell in love with the “golden apple” and never looked back. (Occasional Alfredo dalliances notwithstanding.)

The United States didn’t exist during the first couple millennia of salad’s existence, so we didn’t contribute very much in the way of salad evolution until the twentieth century. British colonists were getting all disgruntled about the crown over plates of salmagundi. (A corruption of the word “salmagundi” probably birthed the charming nursery tale of “Solomon Grundy.” What do you expect of a dish that is composed of “meats, vegetables, seafood, nuts, and flowers?” It's like a shepherd's pie for people with nothing to lose.)

The United States, as a country of immigrants, had always embraced culinary diversity. But a melting pot is no place for a salad. We were late bloomers, as far as salad is concerned. To clobber you with a third metaphor, it was only after we found our voice that we realized we had so much to say, salad-wise.

An emerging middle class, and what the history books call the “home economics boom” of the early nineteen-hundreds, saw meal preparers refining the domestic arts to unprecedented levels. Homemakers put a premium on control and the aesthetically responsible arrangement of salad elements. This ultimately led to such regrettable leaps in logic as fruit salads, suspensions in gelatin, and other so-called salad mutations too grotesque to name here. (Unless you’re into that sort of thing.)

Fantastic-but-brutal experiments are all well and good. But the USA’s indelible mark on the modern salad didn’t come in the form of some Island of Dr. Moreau-style hijinks.

If the red in the American culinary flag is ketchup, and the blue is Kool-Aid, then the white is none other than that creamy, savory, versatile, guilty pleasure of condiments: Ranch. Ranch, sneered at by the culinarati and championed by the masses. Ranch, dripping Americana across pizza, salads, and chicken nuggets. While twentieth-century America also gave the world Green Goddess, Thousand Island, and French dressings, it’s Ranch that will forever be our defining condiment, our spirit animal of sauces.

Like many great American stories, Ranch’s begins with a cowboy. Well, actually, it begins with a plumber—one Steve Henson—who used his savings to buy a dude ranch, which he named Hidden Valley, and in so doing, became a cowboy. His first order of business as a cowboy was to create a savory salad dressing for his guests, obviously, and the rest is history. Almost.

Hidden Valley Ranch is indisputably the first Ranch. But with the advent of bottled salad dressing and “just add” packets, Ranch caught on in a big way, and the sixties and seventies were host to a litany of trademark infringement suits between companies grappling for market share. As the country had its two-hundredth birthday, in 1976, a federal judge told a Fort Worth courtroom that “ranch style” belonged to us all.

So please, look at your salad again. Follow the trail of (any brand) ranch style dressing past banana peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes, as it winds its way deep into the lettuce undergrowth, through litigation and ancient Rome, over a dusting of cracked pepper, and past a conquistador. Understand that before you sits a pilgrim, an exemplar of the human will to till the earth, to assimilate instead of destroy, to turn the necessity of eating into the art of dining. 

2) Plunge in your fork, with respect.