Table etiquette

Table manners are older than the table itself. They reveal and say about us more than we care to disclose.

Having lunch together is certainly the most intimate moment that people can share with each other - besides love making. Just try to remember how many bans, rules and norms of behaviour there are about love making!

When speaking about table manners, they appear similar in all cultures. If you are not sure of how to behave at the table, you are a stranger, outsider, someone who is not the same as others. You differ in your origin, education, age, culture or social status. Not being familiar with the rules is the universal sign that you do not belong there.

The more closed, isolated or exclusive a society is, the rules tend to be stricter and apparently unalterable.

Obsession with the rules is so strong that it resulted with publishing a large number of manuals about proper table etiquette.

That art/skill can never be completely perfected, regardless whether you travel to some foreign country not being familiar with its culture, or you are invited to some diplomatic event where a queen and princes will be present. It's not easy to know for sure what exactly to do. Once the plates in front of you are surrounded with an army of knives, forks, and sets of glasses, you can become quite uncertain about what they all actually serve for. Various manuals will scare you that using the wrong fork is as rude and insulting as if you spitted on the floor. At the end, so as to calm you down, they will give you the most important piece of advice saying: observe what others are doing.

Table manners are older than the table itself. Who is the first to scoop from the common pot? Who is the first to do this, who is the first to do that? Who sits where? Who is the head of the house, court, restaurant, canteen...? Where does a woman sit, if she is allowed to sit at all?

And children? In strict hierarchical and patriarchal societies children are ranked in importance after women. They shouldn't even be sitting at the table. They should stand by the table and wait, patiently and silently, to get some food. Even today some restaurants advertise child friendly attitudes and menus very close to restaurants which allow entry to dogs.

The story about fork and knife

We are advised against eating with our fingers (apart from fruit, cheese, etc), while more than a third of mankind still eats with their fingers.

What once was rude and forbidden today is normal and polite. Let's just remember the story about fork, an everyday object on the table, without which we cannot imagine lunch. The fork was first mentioned in Europe in times when a Byzantine princess who married a Venetian Doge in the 11th century brought a set of forks with her and offended the cultural Venetians who ate with fingers "as God commands". She rudely refused to eat with her fingers.

The rest of Europe considered fork a devil's tool. Even educated Hildegarde from Bingen stood against the fork and those who anger God by using this utensil. If God had predicted his children to use a fork, he wouldn't have given them fingers in the first place. Up to the 17th century fork represented something insulting, impolite and heretic, everywhere except in Italy.

Various manuals will scare you that taking the wrong fork is so annoying and insulting as if you spitted on the floor.

In the middle of the 16th century Henry III ordered using a fork at the French court. He was most probably influenced by his mother Catherine Medici. "A king who eats with a fork", as they used to call him, was murdered with a - knife.

Back in those times it was polite to have your own knife and cut meat and prick it on a fork and bring it to your mouth. Only the aristocratic tables offered a few knives for all the guests to share. And one has to admit that it takes a lot of trust in neighbours to share a knife with them. In 1669 Louis XIV forbade using sharp knives at the table so as to prevent violence.

Once it was not polite to return the chewed bones back to the plate, but it was acceptable to throw them on the floor.

What is forbidden and impolite for us, somewhere in the world can be polite and desirable. But, there is nothing worse than making sounds during lunch, it is written in all etiquette manuals. Chewing, champing, slurping, crunching with a knife on the plate are worst transgressions at the table. In Japan, however, slurping soup is considered well-mannered and desirable.