Evaluating Intercultural Behavior

Talk about intercultural behavior, first thing comes to me is the foods and customs on eating. A Chinese proverb saying "Food is the paramount necessity of the people", which is also true for people from different countries. However, people with different background have extremely different customs on eating, Japanese like to eat raw fish as "sashimi" and delicate foods, Americans give others images with loving fast food like hamburger, chips and coke, Indians crazy about curry with heavy smell and eat with hand, Europeans love steak and toast, and finally Chinese seems dare to eat anything! Singapore's eating customs are multicultural, southeast tastes but also similar to south part of China, so for me it is not considered as intercultural, but I did met some friends with different behavior.

Last Chinese new year, I hung out with my Chinese friends, together with two German guys and one Spanish guy. We went straight on Chinatown to eat self-service Chinese steam pot, the foreign guys looked very exciting, maybe this was the first time they tried real Chinese steam pot. First interesting thing was when they ware going to pick the food, they prefer to pick their own food only, then put into the pot piece by piece, finally eat their food only, for me I just picked beef full with two plates, crab full with three plates so and so on, then put them all in the pot for everyone to eat. It reminds me one main difference between west and east on the dining table, which is that westerner usually put the foods into their own plates and focus on their own food, stands for their independence and self-health. On the contrary, easterner prefer to place the food in the center of table to share each other and pick food for others, stands for close relationship and harmony. Ok, time to showed how to enjoy real steam pot in Chinese way. Second interesting thing was the most usual one, chopsticks. Obviously, these foreign exchange students were not good at using chopsticks, most of the time these two little sticks really freaked them out, one of the them even gave up but instead of using hands. Why do westerners use knife and fork while people from most eastern countries use chopsticks? That is a long story. During the dinner, we talk about the most weird thing you have eaten, I believed my answer deepened the bias about Chinese dare to eat anything, including dogs and bugs. In my opinion, I treat dogs, pigs, cows and chicken as the same, they are all creatures with equal lives, unless you are the strict vegetarian, otherwise you should not judge me what animals I shouldn't eat. We also talk about the other differences of table manners and eating customs between east and west, I found the interesting stuffs of intercultural behavior in food eating. If you have interesting thing on the dinner table with respect to intercultural behavior, share with me!