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Feb. 26th, 2006 09:17 am
the art of shoveling food in your mouth
In my family, there are only two rules of politeness when it comes to food: 1. Eat. 2. Eat more! My mom burps at the table, my dad uses toothpicks, some of us chew with our mouths open, and no one cares if you have your elbows on the table or not, a rule of etiquette that I never understood.
Yesterday we were having lunch with my parents. Lunch with my parents is pretty much the same as dinner with them - bowls of rice with assorted dishes of vegetables and meat. When we first start eating, we pick grains of rice up with our chopsticks. As our rice dwindles, though, we lift the bowl to our mouth, and start shoveling food in with our chopsticks. It is the more efficient method of eating, even if it isn't very pleasant to look at. This process, in our dialect, is called "bort", as in, "tell him to bort the rice", which my parents told me to tell Mark to do, since he was nearing the end of his meal, and was still picking the rice up with his chopsticks. It gets really hard to do at that point, and my parents were just trying to be helpful, but Mark couldn't bring himself to do it.
Later I found out that it sort of grosses him out, and that he was afraid of shoveling food onto his shirt instead of his mouth, so I showed him how to do it. He didn't really get the hang of it, but it's ok if he continues with his present method of picking rice up with the chopsticks. It was very amusing to me because I'd never considered having to teach anyone how to "bort" rice, because I'd pretty much grown up doing that. When we were kids, we had to do that to get every single grain of rice in the bowl. If we left even one grain in the bowl, we were scolded for wasting food.
At least he holds his chopsticks better than I do.
Yesterday we were having lunch with my parents. Lunch with my parents is pretty much the same as dinner with them - bowls of rice with assorted dishes of vegetables and meat. When we first start eating, we pick grains of rice up with our chopsticks. As our rice dwindles, though, we lift the bowl to our mouth, and start shoveling food in with our chopsticks. It is the more efficient method of eating, even if it isn't very pleasant to look at. This process, in our dialect, is called "bort", as in, "tell him to bort the rice", which my parents told me to tell Mark to do, since he was nearing the end of his meal, and was still picking the rice up with his chopsticks. It gets really hard to do at that point, and my parents were just trying to be helpful, but Mark couldn't bring himself to do it.
Later I found out that it sort of grosses him out, and that he was afraid of shoveling food onto his shirt instead of his mouth, so I showed him how to do it. He didn't really get the hang of it, but it's ok if he continues with his present method of picking rice up with the chopsticks. It was very amusing to me because I'd never considered having to teach anyone how to "bort" rice, because I'd pretty much grown up doing that. When we were kids, we had to do that to get every single grain of rice in the bowl. If we left even one grain in the bowl, we were scolded for wasting food.
At least he holds his chopsticks better than I do.