Like 95% of living in a society is putting up with other people’s nonsensical bullshit for the sake of politeness. You aren’t wrong… but that’s not exactly out of the ordinary as far as this stuff goes.
At any rate, accepting a glass of water and not drinking it is always acceptable in my experience.
Actually, now that I think of it – I have certainly refused food and drink and have actually not noticed folks being insulted by it. It’s usually like “Can I offer you a soda or some water?” “No thanks, I’m fine.” “Are you sure?” “Yep.” “OK.” I actually cannot think of a time where somebody seemed offended when I declined a drink. I think the custom is more like when entering someone’s house, a good host will offer you a drink, but it’s perfectly normal to decline. At least around here.
Declining food is a little more tricky if you’re in a situation where food is being served to everyone.
Like I said: cultural differences. The implication, in cultures that think like this, is that the host’s food/household is unclean, or that the host personally isn’t worthy of joining in routine social intercourse with. It’s as if you refused to say hello to them, or pointedly ignored an outstretched hand – not as a matter of offering an elbow bump or a bow or some other alternative to the offered handshake, but as a matter of deliberately expressing ‘you are not worthy to be touched by me’.
And yes, of course there are societies that don’t shake hands. That’s the point I was trying to make. Every human social group has rules about what is and what isn’t polite behavior. They’re not always the same rules; and the point isn’t the specific details of the rules, though there may well be reasons for those. The point is that humans need ways to signal to each other ‘I am behaving normally and am safe to be around’ and ‘I am well-disposed towards you’ and ‘I am either temporarily or permanently pissed off at/poorly disposed towards you but I’m going to express this in a socially acceptable manner’.
And yes, as @Dr.Strangelove said, the guest could say ‘Just a glass of water, thanks’ and then just barely taste it.
I’m not insulted by it any longer, and I’m no longer insulted by being in someone’s house and seeing someone eat something while not offering me any. Because I’ve learned that different cultures are different. And I don’t call them “fucked up” for having different sets of manners.
The people you meet who aren’t offended are either members of cultures which don’t consider it offensive, or they’re members of cultures in which it is offensive who have figured out, as I have, that people from other cultures may not mean it to be offensive.
I thought that was a Dutch player. But my memory is shot, so…
No, you’re correct. I misremembered.
I have been ‘forced’ to eat by insistent hosts. Somewhat cultural I think, but sometimes it’s the simplest way to put an end to it.
Then the last time this came up I just declined most of the food. I was asked to come to someone’s house at 2PM. Nobody told me it was for lunch and I didn’t want to be hungry all afternoon so I ate a substantial lunch before hand. It was a very nice meal being served, I apologized to the host, i picked at some appetizer-y thing, and just declined the rest. Luckily due to fortunate circumstances, I would never see these people again.
Growing up in California, the idea of sitting down for a family lunch at home sounds ludicrous. Outside of school, the mid day meal was so informal that it could be a quickly slapped together sandwich, or just two Oreos, or skipped altogether. I would never be at a friend’s house for breakfast or dinner unless I was spending the night.
Well, that’s how I feel. I participate in the song & dance when needbe. I think it’s weird. Like I said above, the quickest way to ingratiate yourself to a different culture is to partake of all their food and drink, which I am happy to do, as I like experiencing different cultures and am pretty well-exposed to various ways of thinking. But I don’t think I’ve ever come across someone who would take offense to declining a glass of water. What culture is this?
It’s not necessarily cultural. Some people are just nutty. At least in my culture, Murcan, a good host offers but doesn’t insist.
Yeah, in Polish culture there is sometimes the insistence of the host to put seconds on your plate or refill your beverage. The way around that is to leave some food on your plate or leave some drink in your glass so it doesn’t get refilled. But then, I guess, the trick is to eat enough food so it looks like you’ve eaten and are full, but not leave enough to think they didn’t like your food. My culture but, honestly, I find that screwed up. It is advantageous to me because I eat and drink anything and that goes a long way to establishing good rapport with the host in most cases. Hey – a roasted pig’s ear? Sure! Load me up!
In my house, it would be unthinkable to serve a meal and leave a guest in the house foodless. It would also be unthinkable to tell that person to go home. It would mandatory according to manners to say “We’re going to have dinner now; you’re welcome to join us.” And most of my close friends also had that custom. These families were mostly Asian or Italian- or Irish-American Catholic.
There were two situations as a child when I was stunned by my host’s behavior. Both of those situations were in the context of childhood slumber parties.
In the first situation, the next morning, we were served breakfast (french toast), I think we were 11 or 12 years old at the time. At home, we always had savory french toast and the idea of french toast with sugar or syrup was alien to me. I made a request for ketchup and was denied. I was so stunned at the idea of a guest being denied a simple request that I couldn’t believe my ears and I asked a second time.
The second situation was at a different friend’s slumber party, and we were a bit older, probably 15-16. This was was really shocking to me. I was accustomed to slumber parties at which a parent took charge–told us where to lay our sleeping bags, offered to supply any missing items, such as pillows, etc., would let us know where we could get water during the night (sometimes even supplying covered pitchers and clean glasses).
In this case, the parents were completely absent, so I looked to my host, the birthday boy, for accommodations. But, at some point, he just declared he was going to sleep in his own room and didn’t say anything about what the rest of us were supposed to do. We just found places throughout the house to sleep. The next morning, I found our host enjoying a bowl of Cap’n Crunch Peanut Butter Crunch, and I inquired about breakfast. His reply: “I don’t know about you; I’m the only one who eats this peanut butter stuff.”
I was shocked. Barbarians.
My brother told me that whenever he is invited to dinner at the home of white folks, he always eats before going, because in his experience, white people tend not to offer enough to satisfy their guests.
I don’t think the idea of “sitting down to a family lunch at home” is really that important to the issue. Sure, it might be so informal that lunch was a quickly slapped together sandwich and you might even be talking about kids who can slap together their own sandwiches whenever they want to. But would you ( or your parents) have slapped that sandwich together when you had a friend over and not offered the friend a sandwich?
Huh. If I’m expecting company, there will be plenty of food. But I’m Jewish, and Jews feed people as a form of social bonding.
We did have a problem with not having enough food once, though, because my husband served lentils, and it turned out that none of our guests ate lentils, and there wasn’t really any other protein source on the table. I think we ended up offering them toast and milk or something. Awkward.
In my family’s culture, if you are invited to someone’s place for dinner, you would be surprised to see anything less than:
If that sounds similar to a thali you would get at an Indian restaurant, then, yes, that’s where it comes from.
I share your befuddlement. I’ll say it again: “that’s [messed] up.”
I can’t even begin to fathom why a reasonable request like that was denied.
As for coming to my house, I’m not going to have the spread of a South Asian dinner with all its wonderful variety of dishes, but even if you pop in unannounced, it is way more than likely that I will have food to accommodate at least a couple of extra guests. When I cook, I generally cook about 1.5-2x what is needed for that meal, as I like having leftovers around to snack on for breakfast or lunch. (And sometimes folding into a different meal the next day).
I will say, the hospitality I’ve gotten at South Asian households, both as a guest and as a vendor has always been exemplary. But I also don’t recall ever being made to feel bad or offending the host when I declined a drink.
Does your brother have a particularly large appetite or something? Because even the people I have known who usually serve food that can’t really be stretched and don’t believe in leftovers * prepared enough when they invited guests - although maybe not enough for seconds, if that’s what your brother is talking about .
* I had a friend whose husband didn’t experience leftovers until he met her. If four people were having dinner, his mother had exactly four servings of the main course and she never made the sort of dinner that could be stretched by say, serving everyone three meatballs with their spaghetti instead of four. Funny thing is - she’s Italian.
In this case, I think he basically means something equivalent to “waspy” folks. So, doesn’t apply to anyone who strongly identifies with what in American culture has traditionally been considered “ethnic,” like Jewish, Italian, Hispanic, etc.
The one time I have been invited to an Indian’s house for supper, he served less than that. He was vegetarian, so the fish and meat were out. I think he just served us rice and maybe a lentil/cauliflower dish, and another veggie. There may have been a dessert. The memorable thing was that he knew I didn’t eat capsaicin, but I’d told him black pepper was fine. When we ate the food, it was obvious that he kept trying it and thinking, “not hot enough” and adding more black pepper. The dish was gray from the amount of black pepper. It was WAY hotter than I like, and the taste was overwhelmed with the taste of the pepper. But he’d made it especially for me, so I ate a full serving, and pretended I was enjoying myself. 
He went back to India after grad school. I wonder how he’s doing. We haven’t spoken in years.
Ah. I too, have been peckish after being fed by WASPs. I think that household made up the calories in alcohol, honestly.
Yeah, India is not a single ethnic group or culture. My family would probably eat before going for dinner at the home of known vegetarians too.