Growing up, I remember watching my grandma makemashed potatoesfor a holiday dinner. Sitting at the table mashing, she'd forgo a spoon and simply run her finger around the side of the mixing bowl to taste a bite. Similarly, my mom, finishing her salad at dinner, would just pick up stray leaves between her index finger and thumb and bring them to her mouth. She'd swipe a finger through any sauce remaining on her plate; she'd use her hands to take nibbles of anybirthday cakeshe was slicing, running her fingers over the remaining crumbs on the knife or breaking small, frosting-coated bits off of the side.
Watching them eat like this,with their hands, I could tell that they reallylovedfood. But big government-puritanical-heteronormative America (or, at least, Emily Post) will tell you that eating with your hands is a Bad Thing. It's gross. It's germy. It's impolite. It's uncivilized. It demonstrates a lack of impulse control.
But I love to eat with my hands. Like my mom and grandma before me, I habitually grab bites of whatever I'm eating with my fingers. When I was growing up, my mom and I ate a lot of hands-on dinners:cheese platesandcruditésandsteamed artichokesdipped in mayo or butter. It was okay for me, as a kid, to pick up strands ofasparaguswith my hands and eat them at the dinner table. If I wanted to swipe some creamycheesecake and raspberry sauceup with my finger, my mom understood that I was having asensory experienceand not just being a slob. And of course there was plenty of the standard American hand food in my childhood: pizza, sandwiches, tacos.
In fact, hamburgers and pizza and tacos—the most popular foods in America—are intended to be finger foods. And yet, venture out of the accepted handheld food territory, and we all get pretty judgey and uncomfortable.
But in a myriad of other cultures, eating with your hands is the norm, as writer Arun Venugopal discusses in this great2017 NPR piece and video. In Indian families, he explains, it's customary to take bites of rice and curry, sometimes balling them up with your fingertips, with your right hand. He grew up eating this way, although his family kept the custom confined to their home in Texas, adopting the Western fork when eating out. But, he argues—and this is something that I've long suspected—food eaten with your handstastes better.
Venugopal writes thatIndian motherslike to feed their children by hand: "My mom once explained to my teenage self that the secret was biochemical: The subtle oils of her fingers imparted some sort of alchemy to the little sphere—a pheromonal cocktail, I suppose—that would only fully blossom in the mouth of her offspring," he says. But the heightened eating experience extends to feeding yourself, too. One of Venugopal's father's favorite sayings, he notes, is "The hand is our God-given fork."
Eating is sensory. And, in using your hands, you take the sensory experience to another level. You add another whole sense—touch. Since so much of taste and enjoyment of food is about texture, your hands function as another way of exploring the feel, the consistency, the make-up of your food. To me, it feels natural to grab food with my hands—from an evolutionary standpoint, that's a big reason my fingers exist in the first place.
我确信人们容易刷咬with their hands, to tasting with their hands, and dipping fingers into sauces and dressings, taste it better, enjoy it more, have an overall enhanced eating experience. You're closer to the food. You can hold it up and smell it, feel it, examine it, in addition to tasting it. (This was confirmed in part by learning that Alice Waters likes to eat salad with her fingers. "You get to know your salad when you eat with your hands," she notesin theAtlantic. She also usesher hands to mix everythingand taste as she's cooking, feeling that equipment gets in the way of a connection with the food.)
It's difficult, however, to override the social conditioning we all experience that discourages eating with one's hands. As I grew older, I became self-conscious about this habit, and tried to change it. I avoided taking bites with my hands around my friends. I lived in Italy for a while and learned thatNeopolitan pizza should be eaten with a fork. And I complied.
But recently it has occurred to me that if something is practical, easier, and makes food more delicious, why exactly should I be ashamed of it? I'm not suggesting that we thrust whole greedy palms into a bowl of red-sauced spaghetti, or plunge our hands into communal bowls of soups, of course. But I am suggesting that we expand the boundaries of finger food, using our (clean!) hands to take small tastes, to finish off our bowls of rice and salad, to swipe bites of sauce or vinaigrette from our plates.
I won't pretend that I'm fully comfortable doing this in, say, a nice restaurant, or at a work function. But, recently, while eating dinner with my friend andcoworker Becky, I used my fingers to grab some romaine lettuce on my plate, pinching it together with an herby feta-and-farro salad in a perfect finger-food bite . She looked at me for a second, then used her fingers to grab a bite off of her own plate.
"I would be struggling forever to get this last bite if I used my fork," she said. Sometimes you just have to find your people.
