Maybe the kid had the munchies. I poured a bag of potato chips into my mouth once, in the store. Clerk looked at me funny when I paid for an empty bag.
Eh, maybe the guy in the OP has some kind of mental or physical disability and was out to dinner with friends and family. As long as somebody isn’t doing something absolutely repulsive, I rarely even notice other diners.
Just curious though, why aunt and uncle instead of mother and father? That made me giggle in the OP.
:shrug: I’ve never found it hard. If prepared the right way, rice should stick together quite well; and you can use your chopsticks combined with bits of other food to form something like a little shovel to raise the food and rice up out of the bowl.
Or Cantonese 
I’ve never had a problem eating rice with chopsticks…but we will also normally have a spoon handy if we want to use it. Just get some vege, meat or whatever, pick up a bit of rice and bob’s yer uncle.
On a different note - I get a bit bugged when I go to a chinese restaurant and the waiter / waitress just assumes that the ang moh can’t use chopsticks and brings me a knife and fork instead. For chinese food I largely prefer chopsticks (its like eathing with your fingers, but without the mess)
Like the rest of my family, I eat… quickly. I certainly don’t hunch over my plate and shovel as described in the OP, I carry on my usual sparkling and witty conversation throughout the meal (except when there’s food in my mouth), and I manipulate utensils with demure grace, but somehow the eating process is so, well, efficient that I am usually done some time before my dinner partners are.
This is perfectly well-mannered and yet I still feel embarrassed about it. What I’d feel like if I found myself eating like the OP, I can’t quite picture.
My… uh… sorta nephew (sister’s partner’s nephew, does that make me an “uncle once removed” or something?) was once caught standing hunched over with the front half of his body in the fridge like Pooh Bear in the honey tree, shoveling left over sushi into his mouth, barely pausing long enough to chew and oblivious to the presence of the adults behind him. He’s spent the last three months undergoing tests at an endocrinologist.
From what I’ve heard through the grapevine, he has “tiger striped skin” that is related to a metabolic disorder.
Ugh. My ex used to eat like this - why it didn’t immediately make him my ex, I don’t know.* Before he met my parents for the first time, I tried to suggest, gently, that he make a show of more refined behavior for them, but of course he took offense and complained that I was being rude.
Not surprisingly, this is the same man who used to stack his plate with an appalling mini-mountain of mixed foods from the buffet line, prompting a friend at that table to comment, “It’s a stomach you’ve got, not a garbage can.”
*Of course I know. He was good looking, and had reasonable stamina in the sack, too.
That reminds me a little of my first apartment roommate. He was a bit of a hoover at the dinner table. He’s just get into chow mode and plow through it, head down. We always made fun of him a bit for it. His favorite was mashed potatoes.
One weekend his girlfriend was staying over, and she decided to cook dinner for him. (But not for me, for some reason.) The dinner consisted of some kind of meat, some kind of vegetation, and mashed potatoes. The potatoes were done first. The girlfriend stayed in the kitchen area preparing the rest of the food. Paul took the pot of mashed potatoes to the kitchen table and devoured the entire thing in about a minute. Then he said he was full and didn’t want anything else to eat.
The girlfriend took this all in stride. Apparently that was normal for them.
Paul was a great guy, nice as can be, and smart. But no concept at all of table manners.
I worked with a guy who wolfed down his food. He explained he had been sent to a military school as a boy, and they were given very little time to eat. If he didn’t eat fast, he’d go hungry. He tried to lose the habit, but he couldn’t.
Well, I eat real fast since college dorm (1) but I don’t hunch over the food, I can keep up a conversation while eating (no talking with food in my mouth)… Like matt_mcl, I eat real fast while not doing anything that would make Miss Manners faint. In my case, it gets worse when I’m at Mom’s, because if I eat the first dish the fastest and go prepare the second we’re finished eating before dinnertime… if Mom or Lilbro have to do it, I’m done with digestion by the time the steak arrives on the table 
Oh, part of the reason I eat faster than Mom or Lilbro is that I can prepare the food (cut my meat, or serve water, or bread) and talk at the same time. They need their arms free in order to talk, even if they’re just resting on the table.
1: if you ate fast enough you might be able to get seconds; if you didn’t eat fast enough and weren’t done by “close lunchroom time,” the food left on your tray automatically became requalified as “leftovers” and could be grabbed by anybody with a “you don’t have time to eat this, do you?” - by the time they reached the second “you”, the food would already be in their mouths, so no hope of retrieving it (the slow eaters were also the ones with the slowest reflexes).
The whole idea of “table manners” is, in my opinion, completely ridiculous. “Don’t hold your head close to the plate and eat quickly” is exactly as inane as “only use the outside spoon for the first course and the inside spoon for the second one”.
The only manners that matter are hygiene issues like not eating with the serving utensils or double-dipping, and practical ones like holding your utensils in a way that doesn’t interfere with the person next to you, or setting up an initial serving order to prevent everyone reaching for the same thing at the same time, or asking people to pass you stuff instead of reaching over them.
How people eat is their own business. If they want to eat fast and furious, who the hell are you to look down on them for it?
How about eating half of the meal that your SO prepared for you at the table alone while said SO continues to prepare the rest of your meal, then telling her that you’re to full to eat the rest of it – all before she’s even had a chance to have a bite?
Really, you don’t see anything wrong with that?
This reminds me of eating lunch with my farmer relatives. Breakfast and lunch were for refueling, not for socializing. I recall very little conversation at the table.
From a purely practical standpoint (i.e., eating for fuel, not enjoyment), I can see where you’re coming from. However, eating like a pig does interfere with the diners around you. It extremely distracting. Additionally, if you’re out to eat or sitting down to a meal you really enjoy, how are you supposed to taste and savor your food if you don’t slow down a little? When cooking for someone, I appreciate it when they take their time because that tells me the food isn’t so repulsive that they can’t bear to have it be on their tongue for more than a second. In my humble opinion, food appreciation doesn’t equal volume and velocity.
It’s kind of like wrapping a present for someone. You take the time to pick out just the right gift, just the right paper, just the right ribbons, and just the right bow, and lovingly spend an hour making it all pretty. And then they just rip right through it to get to the gift, find out it’s not what they really wanted, and toss it aside.
And again, call me old school, but to me it seems incredibly rude to make a point of showing that the food in front of you is so much more important than the people with whom you’re sharing a meal. Unless you’re a soldier or a farmer, I don’t feel it’s wrong to infer certain things about your character and background from that kind of behavior.
Someone on the boards recently said, of keeping Kosher, that it can indeed be laborious and inconvenient, but that was the point.
There is a similarity with general table manners. Table manners are basically a series of small inconveniences that exist to display respect for the person you’re dining with. Being able to rationally curb animal instincts and feral appetites is part of what separates us from the animal kingdom. We don’t do it for convenience, we do it for civility and as a gesture of respect.
I could just stand in the street and pee down a sewer grate on my way home from work. I would serve me as well, and would be more convenient than, stopping in to use a toilet. I don’t though because of the lack of decorum, it would offend those around me, and would be inconsiderate of others.
If you want to eat fast and furious, go to it. But some people will consider it disrespectful.
I would even take that one step further and divide table manners into two categories: Those that are arbitrary and endemic to a particular society, and those that are common sense and cross cultures. Which side of the plate to put your spoon on falls into the former category. Those that know demonstrate that they get the rules of society and are to be respected as being above the hoi polloi. Not grabbing stuff off of other people’s plates would fall into the latter.
Belching could go either way, I guess.
Yup. Basically, for me this is the bottom line: my dog sticks hs face in his bowl and hoovers his food because he’s an animal incapable of self-restraint. I aspire to be just a little bit better than that.
True, true. But by the time you get to the letter G in the alphabet, it’s probably considered gratuitous no matter where you are.
Oh good. I hope this means you’re going to stop humping my leg.