But fast-forward 500-odd years to the recommendations of The School Food Plan, a report co-written in 2013 by Henry Dimbleby, who recently resigned as the Government’s “food tsar”, and there, too, we find a strong emphasis on eating together as a social adhesive. Its guidance on polite conduct at mealtimes includes not spitting, burping, or taking too large a helping of cheese.Īll very quaint, no doubt. Among the British Library’s collection of children’s literature is a book of table manners from around 1480, The Littille Childrene’s Lytil Boke. And like all skills, manners are most easily learned while we are young. Stripped of their dense varnish of snobbery and anxiety, table manners are a fundamental ingredient of that most pleasant of human customs, conviviality.
Table manners are such a mincing minefield of social hazards that it is no wonder that people resort to eating with their hands (including Governor DeSantis, who was observed by his staff of beady-eyed Miss Mannerses eating a chocolate pudding “with three of his fingers” on a flight from Tallahassee to Washington). My own pet aversion is the American habit (apparently quite acceptable in polite US society, and increasingly common in Britain) of “fork switching”, when food is cut into bite-sized bits before being shovelled with a fork, prongs upwards, into the diner’s mouth. Table manners (or the lack of them) have been a recurring theme in the Telegraph’s letters pages, where Dr Paul Veale recently described restaurant diners using “forks as harpoons, knives as weapons, spoons as shovels”. Meanwhile Trump has made a point of popping into local eateries, underlining the point that mealtimes are about much more than food.
Among the reasons cited for his dwindling popularity are his awkward social skills and, according to former staff members, terrible table manners. While Ron DeSantis has yet to announce a challenge for the Republican presidential nomination, some recent polls show the Florida governor trailing former President Donald Trump.
0 kommentar(er)
