Etiquette guru Daniel Post shared a few rules of dining — and one observation about ritual.
• "Once a utensil has been in your mouth, that doesn't go back into a shared or communal dish, or used to pass a taste to someone."
• "If you are going to ask [someone to share food], recognize that it's an imposition."
• "It's easier to offer than to ask."
Finally, he noted anthropologist Margaret Visser's 1992 book, "The Rituals of Dinner," in which she noted the most sacred and most taboo extremes of dining practices and how, ironically, they are closely related.
The most sacred, she wrote, is the eucharist, in which a wafer representing the body of Christ is offered and consumed.
The most taboo is cannibalism, in which you also eat a body, albeit an actual one. In this case, though, Post said that etiquette forbids any snitching from others' plates.
"You don't eat each other," he said, "and you don't share each other as food."
Kim Ode
