A stabbing

She skewered the red pepper with her fork and brought it aggressively to her mouth.  Then she proceeded to eat it in bites off the fork with her elbow planted on the table.  And this was in a very respectable private club.  Sorry, but table manners are important to me.  Here in Calgary?  Not so much. 

The other night I was seated beside another knuckle-dragger who waved his utensils around wildly while talking, stabbing his food with whichever weapon most handy.  I kept wondering when I would have food slapped upon me as he gesticulated?!  Does this make me a snob?  Not really. 

Margaret Visser wrote a wonderful book entitled 'The Rituals of Dinner', in which she deliciously describes the evolution of table manners.  Given to me for Christmas in 1997 by B, the book rambles intriguingly through what they are and why they were invented.  Says Visser:

"This book is a commentary on the manifold meanings of the rituals of dinner; it is about  how we eat and why we eat as we do.  Human beings work hard to supply themselves with food:  first we have to find it, cultivate it, hunt it, make long-term plans to transport and store it and keep struggling to secure regular supplies of it.  Next we buy it, carry it home and keep it until we are ready.  Then we prepare it, clean it, skin, chop, cook and dish it up.  Now comes the climax of all our efforts, the easiest part:  eating it.  And immediately we start to cloak the proceedings with a system of rules.

"We insist on special places and times for eating, on specific equipment, on stylized decoration, on predictable sequence among the foods eaten, on limitation of movement and on bodily propriety.  In other words, we turn the consumption of food, a biological necessity, into a carefully cultured phenomenon."

She also talks about talking and eating -- a hard act to bring off.  "We must talk as we eat -- it is rude not to -- but never open our mouth if food is in it.  Nothing indicates a well-bred man more than a proper mode of eating his dinner.  A man may pass muster by dressing well and may sustain himself tolerably in conversation.  But if he is not perfectly au fait, dinner will betray him."

Yep, makes sense to me, Margaret.  Basically she says that table manners were invented to stop us from killing each other while we ate.  That woman stabbing her food today is lucky they exist.