Headline Aug 17, 2015/ ''' GO EAT AND BE MERRY '''

''' GO EAT AND BE MERRY '''

ONCE THEY'D FINISHED  -the Dog Soup {not a big deal at all}, a waitress carried out the dog's boiled penis on a silver plate. 

The remote town's mayor, cut it lengthwise with scissors, then served half to each of them.

The author of the above para, is the great writer Pamela Druckerman. And she continues about her anthropologist father-in-Law's visit to South Korea:

'''When a host offers you food, you eat it. It's a show of trust, and a sign of belonging. Refuse his meal and you're effectively rejecting him.

  

OUR INCREASINGLY choosy food habits are the subject of a French collection of academic essays, ''Selective Eating'' : The Rise, Meaning and Sense of Personal Dietary Requirements.'' This super research work has just been published.

The editor, Claude Fischler, a social anthropologist, choose the topic after discovering that even anthropologists aren't exempt: An Australian colleague said she had asked her Aboriginal subjects to accommodate her gluten-free diet, followed by choice, not by medical necessity.

Having lived in America and France, I've been on both sides of the picky-eating divide. I know it's tiresome to hear about the paradoxically fabulous French eating habits. 

But it's no accident that Unesco made the French gastronomic meal part of the ''intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.'' It's worth looking at how they cope with picky eaters.

When I arrived in Paris about a decade ago, I was a vegetarian  [out of squeamishness] and on a low-carbohydrate diet. This had been reasonable in New York, but it baffled Parisians. Restaurants balked at making substitutions. Hostesses didn't ask for any dietary requirements.

In one study 68%  of French adults said they force themselves to eat some of everything when they're invited to someone's home. A Parisian academic told me she has become incensed when an American dinner guest requested a vegetarian meal. ''Although she was extremely friendly and pleasant    -never again!''

There are French vegetarians. too, of course. Lots of people here go on diets, including low-carbohydrates ones. Gluten-free pasts has appeared in the supermarket. But people are low-key about their by-choice eating schemes. 

IN  ''SELECTIVE EATING''  Jean-Denis Vigne, of France's National Museum of Natural History, concludes that the Paleolithic diet is-

More inspired by the myth of the noble savage than by the realities revealed by science,'' and that humans are adaptable omnivores.

Choosy eating interferes with another key aspect of French mealtime: the shared experience of food.

In France,  ''eating does not ave the sole purpose of nourishing the biological body but also and above all of nourishing the social bond.'' writes the social psychologist Estelle Masson in ''Selective Eating.''

This can seem excessively formal. When I invited some French families over to eat pizza and watch a soccer match on TV, they automatically assembled in my dinning room table for a sit-down meal. [I had foolishly envisioned eating pizza on the couch.]

We Anglophones have reasons for adopting strange diets. Increasingly, we live alone. We have an unprecedented choice of foods, and we're not sure what's in them, or whether they're good for us.

And we expect to customize practically everything; parenting , news, medicines, even our own faces.

Anyway, we are not trying to have a shared experience of food, Mr Fischier says that in his focus groups Americans often described eating as part of an individual journey of self-discovery-

In which each person tries to  ''find out''  over time and experience what my true nutritional self is and satisfy it.''

In France, the overarching conventional wisdom   -what everyone from government experts to my French girlfriends take as article of faith  -is that restrictive diets generally don't make you healthier or slimmer.

Instead, it's best to eat a variety of high-quality foods in moderation and pay attention to whether you're hungry. It turns out that the best part of going with the food flow isn't health benefits or the cuisine.

It's the conversation. You can finally talk about something else.'''

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''' Opinion '''

Good Night and God bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless