There’re a lot of rituals that surround parenting.
One I certainly wasn’t thinking about when I had my first child was that making connections with the parents of my children’s friends would involve eating with our hands.
The first time it happened my eldest son, Cailean, was three. Following a year at childcare, Cailean had become fast friends with a gorgeous little blonde-haired boy who was as solidly built as my own son was slight.
They were opposites in other ways, too: Cailean’s new mate was the son of a couple of down-to-Earth Australian’s whose cultural and culinary references were very different to my own Anglo-Indian origins.
But from what I could tell Cailean’s new friend had parents who were open and curious and travelled and lovely. I’d never been faced with the effort of making friends with other adults in order to cement a cherished relationship for my son but it seemed to me that – in the order of good parenting – if I was ever going to make that leap, then the time to make it was ripe.
So I did the needful and suggested this great little Ethiopian joint in Melbourne’s western suburbs that I’d only recently discovered during a food writing forage. The time and date was set and I texted my first parent-friend-in-waiting the details.
Now here I have to diverge momentarily to let you know just how comfortable I am in eating with my hands. I was taught – yes, taught – how to do so by my Indian grandmother during our annual school holiday visits to her New Delhi home:
Eating with your hands isn’t a clutch-and-shove free for all, and the etiquette surrounding the practice can be as complex as the dexterity required to execute it.
Right hand. Thumb, pointer and forefinger. Pinky and ring finger kept clean. Small, neat parcels of food pinched in said fingertips and then brought cleanly from thali to mouth. Serving from the communal bowl is exercised by the left hand. And chapattis are never ripped in to useable chunks by tearing with both hands; the frequent ‘hand eater’ will use a complicated manoeuvre allowing the accomplished to sheer off pieces of bread using only those sanctioned, three right fingers.
It's a skill learned by children around the world: here, students eat a meal at a seminary in Pakistan. Source: Getty Images / Assif Hassan
I loved this style of eating and still do. I love it because I feel the food’s texture before I place it in my mouth; employing touch alongside smell, sight and taste means I add a fourth element to the process of eating that works to increase my sensory experience. The food TASTES better.
But that evening, in an Ethiopian restaurant facing across from a couple I barely knew, I learned to love eating with my hands for another reason.
Large round of curry-topped injera bread placed in the centre of the table, our awkward initial exchange over cold beers is immediately lightened. Sure, we’ve got the food to talk about, but it’s more than that; as I reach forward with my practised right hand to tear off a piece of gravy-soaked injera we get talking on topics other than housing prices and school systems and the weather: we talk of traditions and culinary customs and – once it becomes established that there’s good reason I eat with my hands – these new friends with whom I share so little in common decide to give it a go, too.
I found it humbling to watch their enthusiasm. It didn’t matter if the technique wasn’t ‘right’. What mattered was that, suddenly, a dinner of four acquaintances became less about questions of ‘what do you do?’ and more about funny, intimate and reflective conversation.
Knife-and-fork-formality discarded, we’d wondered off piste in to some unscripted place where friendship doesn’t need six months of weekly coffee dates in order to cement.
Instead, exposed by the sharing of a primal relationship with food, we ventured as a quartet in to the realm of mutual understanding.
I told them of my terror the first time Scott, my then-boyfriend-now-husband, took me to a formal dinner with a Motorsport team that involved a formal meal with multiple sets of spoons, knives and forks: I was completely lost, and Scott had to whisper instructions as to what to use – and how – as the night wore endlessly on.
My new girlfriend, in turn, revealed how nervous her husband had been to come and meet us that very night, concerned about the spice, the foreign flavours - and whether or not he might be forced to eat with his hands.
Vedic and Ayurvedic philosophies aside, I’ve come to love the act of eating with my hands in new company for this very reason: eating with our hands is a human act that induces intimacy.
This intimacy is created as the magic of moving our fingers from plate to mouth takes us back to our beginnings. It returns us to our sensory selves. And just like little kids in a playground, we no longer need to know everything about the Other in order to see within them the shape of ourselves.
