I was just thinking...

Yesterday, when eating lunch at a restaurant with a friend, I found myself spacing out (that is, becoming introspective), looking around, idly watching people eat. While people were not eating in sync, with all spoons going to all mouths in an orderly fashion, eating clearly is a ritualized behavior, with some personality quirks thrown in for good measure. Everyone used the four utensils provided, kept a napkin more or less on their laps, didn't pour their drinks in their laps, and didn't throw food onto the walls or other diners. Everyone was moving food from their plates into their mouths , but only some seemed to clearly savor the taste. Others seemed to be savoring the social aspects of eating--talking between bites. Of the social eaters, some seemed to nibble between words, while others were shoving amazingly large amounts of food into their mouths. Eating is often a social as opposed to a solitary ritual and when we eat alone we probably forget the correct (read, ritualized) behaviors we learned as a child. Further, when we rebel against childhood influences, we breakdown the social rituals, becoming (dare I say it?) more animal like.

While I acknowledge that it was an invasion of privacy to be watching such an intimate moment of indulging (meaning, providing ample opportunity for that sense to perform) a particular appetite, it did raise the question of why it is socially sanctioned to indulge taste in public (not in the sense of having good taste in terms of the arts, but in terms of food flavors) and not so socially sanctioned to indulge some of our other senses in public. Touch is important, yet when we indulge our sense of touch it is often done in private, as in a massage. In South America, I used to be jealous when I watched people get a ritualized, social head massages to get out the piojos or lice. Touch was seen as socially important and appropriate there. One has to wonder how much our failure to encourage touch (which probably is important to this social species called Homo sapiens) is due to Freud (that is, we see it as sexual) or to our individualism. Swimming and mud wrestling are some of the few public indulgences we allow of having something touch our skin. Suddenly, all of our noisy and quiet eaters were converted in my mind into mud wrestlers, cavorting the mud, flipping up and around, enjoying the sense of touch, texture, and smell. Well, this is long enough, tomorrow more introspections on our senses and how we restrain and indulge them.