(~3 minutes to read)
Have you noticed how, when people are gathered and sharing food from a buffet table, they’re reluctant to take the last piece or portion or whatever?
Is this a practice that’s codified in a book of etiquette somewhere? Is it an unwritten rule? Or is it just that nobody wants to be “that person” that deprives the rest of the gathering of the last piece of chicken curry or nanaimo bar or whatever?
I see it so often. In most buffet settings, there’s usually one dish that’s more popular than the others, and so its contents disappear quickest. Let’s say it’s lasagne. The buffet table endures an initial assault from the ravenous horde, and in the feeding frenzy the table loses its pristine appearance. Over in the lasagne dish, there’s one portion left.
Joe goes in and cuts it in two and takes the bigger part. He might even scoop a little of the meat sauce out from under the remaining pasta.
Next, Joanne moves in and cuts the residue in half. She takes most of the larger half and spoons some juice out of the meat balls to wet the lasagne down a bit.
Then Jamie comes along, sees there’s still a credit card-sized piece left, swoops in, and cuts it in two. He/she/they takes half and moves on to the salad bowls.
Uh oh! Here comes Reg! His appetite is legendary. He’s sure to take the rest!
But no… he cuts it in half and does the same as Joe did. Now there’s this postage stamp of pasta with next to no sauce under it.
Surely John will take it all…
Of course he doesn’t. He knows the rules. He takes a big-toenail-sized piece of pasta, smears it round the dish on his fork to get some sauce and walks away safe in the knowledge that he did the right thing.
Julie’s hovering. She sees the other toenail-sized piece and wonders what she should do.
She dissects it and walks away with her fingernail trophy.
“Legendary appetite Reg” moves in for thirds, and is shocked to see how small that third helping is going to be. Fortunately, he’s prepared. He removes his trusty multitool from its sheath on his belt, selects the extra sharp knife, and trims the fingernail substantially. For his troubles, he gets a piece of pasta the size of a bitten pinky nail with some slight staining from the sauce on its underside. He wipes the blade clean on the white tablecloth, stows the multitool, and proceeds to the crockpot, where he takes the last but one meatball.
Jasmine, who had arrived at the buffet table just after Reg is horrified that she’s going to have to cut such a small portion of lasagne in two and opts for cutting the last meatball in half instead.
In the ensuing thirty minutes or so, the meatball become a meat-hemi-demi-semi-ball, the sausage rolls become a sausage roll and a dusting of abandoned puff pastry, and the lettuce salad remains untouched. All the chicken drumsticks have gone except for one that looks like it’s actually a malnourished-sparrow drumstick. All that remains otherwise is a generous helping of coleslaw, the picked-over carcass of a spinach rip-and-dip, some semi-desiccated cheese slices, and a singleton bread roll that a bored child had poked three fingerholes in to make it look like a bowling ball.
Plus the final bitten-pinky-nail-sized piece of lasagne.
All this time, Reg has been wondering about the lasagne. Finally, his curiosity gets the better of him and he wanders over to the buffet table. He gets his forceps and scalpel out and successfully cuts the fingernail of pasta in three. With a pair of tweezers, he picks up each piece in turn and places them in the three fingerholes on the bread roll.
Next, he carefully cleans and stows his surgical equipment, picks up the bread roll, wipes the lasagne dish with it and rams the entire roll in his mouth. His cheeks puff out to accommodate the bread, and he chews and chews, and chews. Unfortunately, his allergies are playing up, and he’s forced to open his mouth in order to breathe, and cannot prevent the contents of his mouth from being put on view. Finally, he sneezes and shares the now-unrecognizable bread-bowling-ball with those in the sneezing line.
What a breach of etiquette! And someone notices, nudges her neighbour and lets out a gasp of horror. Within seconds, the entire room is aware of the transgression.
“Oh my God, Reg!” says Jasmine. “You took the last piece of lasagne!”