My Japanese senior Watanabe from last year’s Kyushu University ATW summer programme came to visit Singapore last week with his Thai girlfriend Pear and another Vietnamese friend Duc. To complete their gourmet experience in Singapore, a couple of my Singaporean friends and I brought them to have chili crabs for dinner at No Signboard Seafood Restaurant at The Central.
In this region of Southeast Asia, having chili crabs for dinner also means getting your fingers and platters messy in the process of devouring the delicacy hidden within the confinement of the crabs’ shells. While Pear found this to be the norm even among Thais, to Watanabe, this was a mind-blowing dining experience eating with bare hands. We explained how appropriate and practical enjoying chili crab in this manner is and the use of warm water with sliced lime in a bowl to clean fingers to his astonishment. Nevertheless, he enjoyed the sumptuous meal served in a sea of thick and slightly spicy gravy, albeit not without occasional help from Pear at the beginning of the meal.
In the context of Japanese table manners, the use of bare hands when dining is strictly reserved for certain types of food such as nigirizushi, temaki and bread. Even eating these two kinds of sushi using bare hands is governed by strict manners and restrictions; regardless whether utensils are used, one is expected to treat the food served with honour and respect (teinei) to demonstrate the care given and knowledge about proper table manners. This refined attitude towards food is strikingly different that when one meets face-to-face with chili-crabs. On the other hand, Duc might have thought that it is absolutely proper to follow what the locals do given the different understanding in what defines a “proper attitude towards food”.
What do you think about the way people acclimatize their presupposed interpretation of culture in a globalised world?
