The importance of sharing

Americans don’t just eat food – they participate in it. No where else will a total stranger pass your restaurant table, glance at your plate, and ask, ‘is it good?’ Eating is a shared experience. Ameri-male in love cannot take his eyes from his girl-friend’s face – or his fork from her plate. True love is never having to ask permission.

Friends and relatives do the same, with a tangle of anxious arms criss-crossing the table and spearing food in all directions. Brits are put right off, seeing this as an invasion of privacy and disgusting as well. When visiting America, they live in fear that a casual acquaintance or business associate may ask to taste something of theirs. Should they treat it as a presumptuous intimacy, or a friendly gesture? Does it constitute a binding contract? How can you negotiate tough terms with someone who has your hot fudge all over his face?

Because America is made for sharing, portions come in giant sizes ... usually enough for two or three. Waitresses will provide extra plates without batting an eyelid ... though, recently, some maverick establishments have introduced ‘sharing charges’. These are seen as a threat to the American way of life.

In case dividing the lobster, or the spare ribs, or the onion-ring loaf is messy, plastic bibs and extra napkins are provided. It is OK, even de rigueur in these circumstances, to behave like a slob. The waitress will eventually come around to ask if you’re enjoying your dinner. It will be hard to answer with a full mouth.

American children visit restaurants from earliest infancy, and share their mothers’ dinners. At the age of 6, they need dinners of their own, because they eat more than she does. Brit-kids are not generally ‘taken out’ – unless you count fast-food take aways, or the occasional tea-shop treat. It is considered that they need different diets than adults, and thrive best on a meal called ‘nursery tea’ ... which is specially composed to include 100 percent carbohydrate, and no protein at all. Biscuits, cake, bread-and-butter, crisps and spaghetti-on-toast are favourites, and these must be consumed:

1) in the company of other children, or at most of adult. Brits operate strict rules of nutritional Apartheid.

2) At 5 p.m. latest.

Brit-kids retire early, and not allowed to

a) stay up till 9;

b) eat with grown-ups.

Brit guide to Ameri-portions

1. Char-broiled New York cut steak (8–13 oz)

will overhang the plate on one side. Share with a friend.

2. Prime ribs of beef

will overhang the plate on both sides. Ask for two extra side-dishes to take overspill.

3. Surf-and-turf (combo. of lobster-tail and steak)

won’t fit on the plate in the first place. Served on special wooden stay-hot griddle platter. You won’t need dessert.

4. Onion-loaf (side order only)

feeds four generously, six adequately. Ignore the waitress’s advice that you need one for every two people.

5. Club sandwich

... not quite big enough for the whole club. Divide with one child.

6. Salad (spinach, waldorf, Caesar, fruit)

contains world’s natural reserves of raw fruit and veg. Undoes benefits of low calories if you eat it all. Share with one other weight-watcher.

7. Banana split

three can share. One scoop per person. Child gets the cherry.

8. Ice cream cone (any size)

no one can share. It’s too good, and each person will want it all. It is not unusual for a grown-up to come to blows with a child over an outstanding cone.

COMPREHENSION

Exercise 1.Think up 3–5 true or false questions to make sure your classmates have got their cultural things right.

LANGUAGE PRACTICE

Exercise 2.Find words and phrases in the text that can be used as synonyms of the ones below and comment on their possible difference, stylistic and otherwise. Think up appropriate contexts with them:

to chew / to amount to sth. / to stop / to fight / to derive pleasure from sth. / cuisine, n / cautious.

Exercise 3.Identify the cultural information, cultural topics and stereotypes in the text and comment on them.

Exercise 4.Make up a list of typical British and American dishes and find out what they are made of and when and how they are served. Present your findings in a chart format.