Ask George: What everyday foods do people eat the wrong way?

What everyday foods do people eat the wrong way? —Sally S., St. Louis

Although the term “wrong” might be somewhat contentious, there are foods that people could consume “more efficiently.” For other items, it comes down to personal preference. I came up with a few in each category, and SLM‘s dining team chimed in, too.

Wrong:

• Sushi rolls/nigiri/sashimi: In short, lose the chopsticks…most of the time. Proper sushi etiquette calls for eating cut rolls and nigiri with your hands; sashimi and ginger are picked up using chopsticks. Turn nigiri fish-down, apply soy sauce sparingly, and place on the tongue face-down. If wasabi must be used, apply a small amount with chopsticks. Do not mix wasabi into the soy sauce. Sliced ginger is a palate cleanser between bites, not mid-bite.
• Yogurt: Some people pour off the liquid (called whey). Stirring it in adds nutrients and creates a better texture.
• Leftover pizza: If you care a whit about quality (and you should), then leftover pizza slices (or squares) are best reconstituted in a partially covered skillet over low to medium heat. Doing so gets closest to approximating the crust’s original texture (and it doesn’t take a whole lot longer than pushing “40 seconds” on your microwave).

More efficiently:

• Hot dogs: As any Chicago dog devotee knows, cup the dog with your hand and consume the pooch “goodie side up.”
• Chicken wings: A less messy way to negotiate the two-boned “flattie” is to remove the bones (by twisting, small one first) before eating, thereby creating a boneless wing.
• Cupcakes: There are those who cut the cake in half horizontally, flip the top over, and eat like a sandwich, icing in the middle.

Personal preference:

• Pizza: Hands? Utensils? We covered that one here.

And now this from SLM‘s dining team:

From Dave Lowry:

Risotto should be eaten with a spoon. A fork digs into the mound of risotto and leaves a gap that helps cool the rice more quickly, whereas a spoon allows the diner to carve off the rice from the edges, gradually working one’s way into the interior while the whole mound stays hot.

Paella should be eaten from the pan, carving out a wedge and working inward. 

Japanese and Chinese citizens typically pick up rice bowls, but Koreans do not. (Korean bowls are metal, too hot to handle easily, while Japanese/Chinese bowls are lacquer or porcelain.)

You’re sitting with a slab of Beaufort d’été, one of the summer vintages that go so great with a good Burgundy, and you balance a slab of that wonderful cheese atop a salted cracker, a Saltine, a Triscuit, an Italian Sophia—whatever you’ve got in the pantry. You prepare to pop it in your mouth. No, no, no. Stop. The cheese—or any other topping—goes on the bottom of the cracker, not on the salted top. That way, the salt hits your tongue first and sets your palate up for the cheese. Turn the cracker over and load it. If we could follow this simple rule, it might actually lead to world peace.

From Holly Fann:

• Bugles should always be set like tiny wizard hats directly on the tip of your fingers before eating.
• White Castle Chicken Rings are also a finger food but should be placed on the pointer finger like a spoke and then rotated as bites are taken. 
• Heath and Skor bars should be scraped of their chocolate coating before consuming the toffee.
• The first bite of a sandwich made on traditional, square-ish pullman-shaped bread and cut on the diagonal should always be taken from whichever corner is the most acute. 
• Lastly, when eating an STL-style square-cut pizza, the four small, triangular “corner” pieces should be eaten first. Failure to do this can upset our fragile internal balance and has been linked to irritability, pizza dysthymia, and existential malaise. 

From Pat Eby:

My younger brothers were quite perplexed with the baby ears of corn in Chinese takeout and did the same thing that Tom Hanks did with them in Big.

In my later years, the little girls I babysat showed me the proper way to eat string cheese: “You don’t just take a bite out of it; you pull it into strings because it’s fun that way.”

When eating cevapi (the Balkan staple), most people try to cut the somun bread and eat it like a sandwich, resulting in pieces of spiced sausages falling back onto the plate. The proper method is to pull off a bit of somun and then wrap it around a sausage. Or eat the bread with the customary onions and kaymak (a dairy product similar to clotted cream) and then a morsel of meat.

From Cheryl Baehr:

I’m generally a live-and-let-live sort of gal, but I find bread-sliced bagels to be a point of civic embarrassment. Maybe we thought this was OK to do when it was harder to find proper bagels in town, but we’ve now graduated. There’s only one situation where this gets a pass: When you’re bringing bagels to a function where there will be a large number of preschoolers. They take one bite of anything and leave the rest behind. It’s wasteful. Plus, their little hands can grip the slices much easier than a whole bagel. Once you’ve made it to kindergarten, you should know better. Eating a bread-sliced bagel after the age of 5 is the equivalent of an adult ordering a Happy Meal. 

From Lynn Venhaus:

These are more pet peeves than correcting any bad habits: 

• I always find it weird when people eat pizza with utensils. Or dip crusts in Ranch dressing (I don’t get it).
• And this is really bad etiquette: people who smoosh chocolates in a box to check what the filling is.
• And the office communal donut box when someone breaks off a half with their hands, and leaves the other half to dry out amongst the selection.
• How about the people that pick out all the rye bagel chips in the Gardetto’s snack mix?

From Collin Preciado:

I’ll never forget the look of disgust on a friend’s face as they watched me glop a mountain of oatmeal on a piece of toast and then eat it. I don’t know if it’s a Missouri Bootheel thing or what, but I have since asked others in St. Louis if they do this and no one outside my family has any idea what I’m talking about. My oatmeal is typically on the sweeter side, so the addition of toast adds a nice crunchy and savory dimension to what is indisputably the most boring breakfast food imaginable, and I can’t imagine eating it any other way. Plus, I’m always trying to find more ways to exacerbate my carb intake.

From the late dining critic Ann Lemons Pollack:

There’s the guy who put a scoop of ice cream on his morning oatmeal every morning. Milk? Check. Sugar? Check. Cool down, so it can be eaten fast? On yer way, buddy.

And there’s the game of eating a dessert with both a fork (left hand) and spoon (right hand), which I finally figured out in a swank Paris restaurant several years ago. When eating ice cream and cake separately, use the fork and spoon together, the latter in the dominant hand. The spoon does the work—cutting, slicing (much like a knife), scooping, and maneuvering it to your mouth. The fork is used as a helper and to push food onto the spoon.

And last but not least, there’s the proper way to eat a Snickers bar, courtesy of Seinfeld. 

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