Savage Dining
How about we grant ourselves a silly summer?
Jun. 12 - Americans hold their forks in the left hand and knives in the right to cut their food, then set their knives down, switch their forks to the right hand, and eat.
That is the American way and therefore perfect.
Danes, like most Europeans, keep their forks in their left hands and knives in their right throughout the meal, never changing. That is the continental way, and therefore civilized and refined.
Americans think I’m weird because I use my utensils the European way. That in itself doesn’t bother me, but Europeans think I’m weird because I use my utensils the American way.
That’s my problem: I don’t eat like an American or a European.
I ate the American way until I moved to Denmark and started trying to eat like the people around me—except I apparently suffer from some kind of utensil dyslexia: I keep my fork in my right hand, my knife in the left, and that’s that.
So I’m an etiquette failure on at least two continents.
Make that three, because I refuse to eat with sticks. I’m the guy you’re embarrassed to go to Chinese restaurants with because he always asks for a fork and knife and makes everyone feel so boorish and inauthentic.
“I mean, man, it was just like we were eating in China until Greg had to ruin it all by insisting on imperialist settler-colonialist utensils.”
I hear that a lot. And when I say a lot, I mean never—but I can see it in their eyes. The contempt, the disapproval, the disgust.
I am a wounded creature.
I mention this because of an article in the New York Post:
“Americans roasted by Europeans over ‘primitive’ eating habit: ‘Worse than nails down a chalkboard’.”
It’s a stupid article, the worst kind of filler: something goes viral on TikTok, so some “journalist” writes an article about it, fluffing the word count with excerpts from the online comments.
“It’s not the ‘European Way,’ it THE CORRECT WAY,” one commenter fumed.
(…)
“I’m confused, so how do Americans use cutlery?” asked one commenter, apparently still recovering from the cultural whiplash.
Yeah, well. Commenters gonna comment. It’s their thing, let them have it.
(Be nice if some of them showed up around here once in a while. The comment section is right there, people. I don’t bite. Hard. Often.)
Savage that I am, I’ve actually made it through plenty of fine dining experiences among fine people without having been shamed or ostracized. (That I know of.)
The closest I ever came to a direct cultural criticism of my dining habits was when I was out to lunch with a couple of Germans in Hamburg a couple of decades ago. Neither of them had ordered a drink with their lunch.
“Aren’t you guys gonna get something to wash it down with?” I said.
Maybe that was a little too colloquial for people who spoke English as a second language—third if you count COBOL—but it was said light-heartedly right after I’d ordered a diet cola and was pretty obviously not meant literally.
“You don’t have to ‘wash it down’ with anything if you chew correctly,” one of the Germans said with such icy condensation my diet cola spontaneously froze.
Humorless fucking huns.
In any case, the sight of that utensil story and its observation that the TikTok video in question “racked up more than 2 million views and thousands of comments” was actually a balm to my spirit.
Please, God, let this be the summer of the continental cutlery crusades!
Wouldn’t that be nice? To have water cooler and dinner party debates over utensil usage instead of. . . all this other crap?
Is there other stupid stuff out there we could use to flood the social media and “journalism” zones to blot out the dour and dreary parade of misery and doom being pushed at us from every angle 24/7?
I see PageSix has a fascinating feature on the 14 best lip glosses, according to celebrities. How about that? Not only can we argue about their selections: we can argue about which celebrities were chosen (who the hell is Bethenny Frankel?) and why the list was limited to 14. That’s a weird number for a listicle—and there’s another thing we could bicker about> the proper length of listicles!
Let’s rewind to the halcyon summer of 2001, the “summer of the shark,” the summer of Chandra Levy, the summer of trivial and weightless distractions— the last innocent and careless summer of the modern era.
Let’s—
Never mind.
Ah, the good old days, when we were all agog at Terry Schiavo or Elian Gonzalez. Back when we were all confronted with the absolute moral authority of Cindy Sheehan and the press was invited to follow Gary Hart all the way to Donna Rice's doorstep. Further back to Abscam, the Profumo Affair and Charles van Doren cheating on Twenty-One. It all seemed terribly important at one point.
Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven.