FOOD MATTERS: Eating elegantly with fingers

The Chinese believe it is uncultivated to eat with one's fingers. South Asian foods, are designed to be eaten with fingers, it is said. Malays, Ethiopians, Senegalese all eat in public with their fingers. Nigerians...it is hard to say. Like the South Asians, it would depend on the context, but essentially it would not be acceptable to sit across from Mr. Babatunde Fasola SAN at a dinner party organised by the Lagos State Judiciary and eat pounded yam and okro soup with your fingers.

One day, in a buka on the Obafemi Awolowo University campus there was this woman eating a bowl of gari and soup. I don't remember what soup now - it didn't make an impression- but by the time I sat down, I could not look away from this lone diner.

I can still picture the fingers on her right hand - her index and middle fingers to be precise, going into the bowl, her thumb indifferently smoothing over her morsels, small enough to feed a child, and the slow ascent of food into her mouth. Her forth finger was elegantly unemployed and her little finger which was not only unemployed as well, was held up in the most deliberate of crooks, like the ones you see little fingers of those Victorian ladies on television assume when they are having tea. I had to look around the room again. Perhaps she had a companion who had gone off to the bathroom, or maybe there was someone behind the dingy curtained doors watching her for kicks.

It was one of the most incongruous of pictures. There was of course the facial expression to go with the eating - you know - detached, bored, uninterested. Eating not because I want to, but dammit, because I have to - expression. She wore her Iro and buba well, gracefully; and her gele was perched on one side of her head. It was all just so wonderfully deliberate that I wished I had a video camera.

This was not pretentiousness, it was...(struggling for the word)...sexy. She walked out of the room when she was done with her meal, and my fingers immediately tried to copy hers...in vain! Greasy messy paws in comparison.

I forgot to add that when you looked at the two fingers doing the work of taking food to her mouth, there was absolutely no palm-oil on the back of them. It was like all that she was doing was just brushing the soup with the gari. Her fingers were so clean, she could have indeed eaten and given you a handshake at the same time.

In my mind now, I compare her to an acquaintance, who once stood up at a Christian fellowship for "singles" looking to be married and said she was very sorry, but she could not "be" with anyone who did not know the difference between a salad and a fish fork!
I think what made the biggest impression on me with the woman at the buka was the fact that she had taken the functionality of eating with fingers (and in bukas it is 100% functionality) and successfully adapted it to the context of being out in public and making a good impression.

She had dressed it up. Made it the drama we all culturally enact when we dress up, go out and eat like our mouths can't open past small slits... even if she was the only one watching her own enactment until I came along, and even if it was in a dark buka in the back of nowhere. If it were possible to eat gari and soup at the consulate dinner, she would certainly have been the candidate to carry it off.

I can admit that she was in fact being pretentious, but I will never prefer the pretentiousness of salad and fish forks over her sort of pretentiousness. I would choose hers any day. It isn't after all, everyone using a metal implement to eat that is easy on the eyes. In public, on numerous occasions I have seen people holding tablespoons in their fists like shovels and attacking bowls of rice with it.

And eating with ones fingers gracefully is not easy. The woman in the buka had first learnt how to eat with her fingers and then gone on to perfect the "shakara" of it.
(Buki cut from here.......

Indax, the Internet service providers in giving an overview of India also give us a useful manual on eating with fingers:

"...A small amount of rice is collected in a small pile on your plate, blended with one or more bits of curry, and then picked up with a twist of the wrist and held on the four fingers of your hand. The thumb remains free. Keeping the food level, manoeuvre your fingers to your mouth until the tips of your fingers are almost, or just, touching your lower lip. Don't put your fingers into your mouth. Use your thumb to pop the food inside."

I will of course not be caught dead eating with my fingers in public. Not because I have any iota of belief that eating with ones fingers is inferior to eating with forks and knives, or is vulgar, or for natives, but because I would never live it down. The off-putting shuddering sight would be that of oil running down my hand, three whole fingers going in and out or my mouth and smacking of lips and licking of fingers.

For those who are willing to practice to perfection eating gracefully with fingers, it is claimed that fingers have powerful nerve receptors linked to the digestive system. That handling ones food releases digestive juices and enzymes and enhances the meal. Bon chance!