One diner's friendly sharing is another's rude snitching

Sharing is caring? Not everyone thinks so when it comes to food.
Sharing is caring? Not everyone thinks so when it comes to food.

The fork hovers.

An eyebrow arches with the proper sense of supplication.

The desire: a morsel of your tuna lying amid a confetti of blood orange segments and mild Fresno chiles.

Just a taste, hmm? Thanks! Oh, um, can I get a little more sauce on that?

In many restaurants -- well, OK, not McDonald's, etc., where curiosity rarely is an issue -- snitching food from companions' plates is a time-honored behavior. If you've waffled between ordering the risotto or the polenta, you can always cadge a bite from those who ordered the other.

Ah, but listen to us, loading the dice with talk of "snitching" and "cadging," as if this is illicit.

"I prefer to call it sharing, or tasting," says Carol Manning of Minneapolis, a longtime seeker of all the flavors on the table. "I'm just genuinely interested in what everything tastes like, and other people's food always looks so interesting."

Of the many social crevasses that crease our lives, one of the craggiest separates those who freely snitch and share from those who believe that if you wanted the squid ink pasta, you should have ordered it. (Jeez!)

To snitchers, trading tastes seems harmless. Yet some diners resist, conscious of germs, wary of reaching across wine glasses, or just honestly wanting to enjoy every smidgen of their creme brulee.

Manning stresses that she'd never snitch without permission. That would be rude. And she has grown adept at reading a companion's body language.

She says she gives nonsharers several dining opportunities to say yes before she finally gives up.

"A longtime friend is just so not interested in sharing," she says, despite repeated forays toward her plate. "But I've now given up on asking her."

A poll on Serious Eats, a popular foodie website, once posed the question: "Do you ask before eating off your friend's plate?" The response overwhelmingly favored asking first, and also not pouting if you are rebuffed.

One poster says groups of good friends order expecting a quasi-potluck experience, "passing around bites on the bread plates." When one woman dines with her husband, "it's not unusual for us to swap plates midcourse."

No worries, says Daniel Post. Sorta.

Post is the great-great-grandson of etiquette expert Emily Post, and with his cousin Lizzie Post runs the Emily Post Institute and hosts the "Awesome Etiquette" podcast on American Public Media (infiniteguest.org/awesome-etiquette).

So, is it permissible to share food in a restaurant?

"One of my favorite themes in talking about etiquette is that you have to know the rules to know when to break them," Post says.

The baseline rule here: You eat off your plate and I eat off mine.

Post says, "Having that baseline is important because it helps you get through a meal with more formality."

But say you're lunching with a new client and the question of sharing a dessert comes up, he says. He recommends declining, "deferring to that more formal behavior, sticking to the code of conduct I know."

He quickly adds, "But I wouldn't recommend that for a first date. Ordering a dessert to share may not only be OK and appropriate, but the start of a memory that lasts a lifetime."

As for the best method of scoring a smidgen of scallop, Post says it's easier if you proffer a taste and see if it's reciprocated. At the least, you've shown yourself to be a generous soul, which serves a larger goal.

"The way we relate over food is so fundamentally important," he says. "I don't think there's anything inappropriate here. It's just managing expectations at the table."

Indeed, a study in 1997 in the European Journal of Social Psychology found that American college students who shared food were seen as having positive social interactions. Actually feeding food to each other implied a romantic relationship.

Yet the most intimate or heartfelt connections were when one person accepted food that their companion had tasted, bitten or touched -- something that researchers called "food consubstantiation," which pretty much is as far as we need to go on that subject.

Bottom line: When we share, we care.

Post says he believes that rules of etiquette are founded in consideration, respect and honesty. Thus, snitching with permission is fine, when balanced by offering without sanction.

Manning wouldn't have it any other way: "I can't think of a time I haven't offered someone a taste." Although, she adds upon reflection, "sometimes it's a very little taste."

Style on 01/12/2016

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