“No forks.”
The server at the famous barbecue pit gave me a stern staredown in response to my simple request.
“Knives and spoons only,” Esther added at the checkout counter at Kreuz Barbecue in Lockhart, Texas.
“Do you want a pickle?”
Chastened, I nodded gratefully for a dill the size of King Kong’s toe, and carried my paper picnic platter over to the long brown Formica table beneath the 12-foot rattlesnake skin on the century-old brick wall. My plate was piled high with beef shoulder that had been smoked for eight hours, plus two pieces of doughy white Bimbo bread and the aforementioned bar-jar pickle. A quintessential central Texas midday meal.
How do you eat this legendary repast? Pile the sliced meat chunks on the bread, spoon on barbecue sauce if you want, and pretend you’re at a high school rodeo. It’s not white-linen dining. Interlopers who ask about the fork prohibition are informed about the meaty weight of tradition.
“Just how it’s done.”
In other words, there’s no discrete, sophisticated reason to deny customers forks. It just … is.
Around the world, from the Hill Country of Texas to the high plateaus of Africa to the sultry cities of Asia, dining customs vary far beyond the Emily Post parameters Americans know. Sometimes they’re rooted in cultural traditions that make sense, or used to: The Jewish and Islamic avoidance of pork recognizes the very real dangers of trichinosis. The Jewish prohibition against consuming meat and dairy in the same dish comes from an Old Testament verse, which apparently forbids an ancient Canaanite fertility practice.
Sometimes these customs seem random, but adhere to hidden culinary principles: In much of Europe, the salad course comes after the entrée, not before. Soup, appetizers, and bread precede the main dish. Salad precedes dessert. It’s considered a palate cleanser, though how a plate of bitter greens with olive oil and vinegar cleanses taste buds, I’m unsure.
Or, no cutlery whatsoever: No forks, spoons, knives, nada. In Ethiopia’s remote, exotic mountain city of Harar—the legendary birthplace of coffee consumption—in the hillside town market, a tureen of braised camel flank comes with no cutlery at all. You just ladle the food onto pieces of injera, the Ethiopian bread that resembles a Spandex tortilla, and chow down. Yes, using your hands.
I ask my guide about silverware, and he shrugs. “The bread’s good, yes? The meat?” I nod enthusiastically, because it’s true and because scorning tradition is impolite in many ways, in many places. Just ask Erik Wolf, founder and president of the World Food Travel Association (WFTA) of Portland, Oregon.
WFTA promotes food tourism and encourages travelers to embrace the diversities of dining culture worldwide—April 18 is the organization’s World Food Travel Day. Wolf argues there are few, if any, utterly untenable dining customs or foods, no matter how bizarre they may seem to Americans, or vice versa. While encouraging travelers everywhere to be as adventurous as they can manage—isn’t that the whole point of travel?—he adds that one of the benefits of globalization is widespread acceptance of culinary and customary differences.
“It’s appropriate to keep a smile on your face while others indulge in things that seem less appetizing to you. This way, you can show you are entertained by the different experience,” Wolf advised.
“And if you just cannot partake in some particular custom, a trend working in the favor of many travelers these days is the surge in special diets—not just vegetarian and vegan, but gluten-free, organic, no artificial sweeteners, no added sugar, kosher and halal, and I have even met bacon-flexible Jewish travelers. Everyone loves bacon, right? The point is, people now are more used to the unexpected, either way.”
I have found this completely true when, no matter where I am, I decline alcohol. In Paris, Dublin, Beijing, Wyoming, Vienna, Cape Town, and Tbilisi, I’ve received no pushback anywhere. I usually need not even explain that I don’t drink at all, ever.
This is quite a change from the ceremonial pre-dinner booze bacchanalia common in some cultures. I’ve yet to test my principles in the place supposedly most wedded to drunken debauchery, Russia, but it’s been fine in Romania, Bulgaria, Taiwan, and many other locales.
Still, generational change doesn’t mean extinction of traditions, even if you’re able to politely decline.
The guest of honor at east Asian banquets is traditionally offered the eye of the whole fish as a good-luck gesture. Yes, I did eat it—twice. Kind of a nothingburger, though eyeballs are said to have buckets of beneficial trace minerals (really).
In many Asian cultures, it’s not only not rude to slurp your soup and belch after dinner; it’s considered a traditional, polite way to signal your approval of the food.
In much of the Arabic world, Wolf points out, it’s considered ghastly to eat with your left hand, as it used to be reserved for hygienic purposes. Indoor plumbing is common almost everywhere now, but the tradition persists. “Even with cutlery,” Wolf added.
Other examples abound: In parts of Italy, it’s unthinkable to mix cheese and seafood, as in pasta. Chileans supposedly frown on ever using your hands, even to eat sandwiches.
Sometimes the situation is key. I tried a skewer of fried scorpions in a street food market in Beijing—but my guide, a young Chinese woman, stepped back and declined. Neither one of us thought to deride the other. I was an adventurous visitor, she a young member of the Facebook generation. My nephew, a globe-trotting executive for the world’s largest consulting firm, was a little taken aback to realize that the lean, skewered carcasses roasting over charcoal in Vietnamese street markets weren’t goats. No matter how worldly, he had no desire to sample dog—but says he'd have done so, to be polite, if he were at a private dinner.
I see global dining distinctions as just another facet of the beautifully kaleidoscopic, infinite cornucopia of food. They illustrate one of the great lessons of travel: So many things we think of as truth are actually custom.
You'll never find fried scorpions in Iowa. But there’s no deep-fried butter in Beijing, either.
You can get a fork now at most barbecue restaurants in Texas, even in Lockhart. But many of the Lone Star state’s small town pits are being refashioned into taquerias. That’s fine—one can’t stop cultural tides, and I embrace good tacos which, by the way, are often served minus cutlery.
But maybe if the former barbecue pitmasters had all saved costs on unnecessary forks, things would be different?
What I mean to say is: Things are different. Everywhere. Let’s celebrate it as much as we can while it’s still true.
