Will Miss - #493 drinking soup from a bowl

Since coming to America, my husband has refused to eat soup with a spoon. This is the result of having been "spoiled" by the Japanese custom of conveniently tipping the bowl up to ones mouth and taking a slurp. Though I have no problem at all with his doing this at home, I feel a little strange about the possibility of doing it in public. I'm going to blame the Europeans for creating nonsensical rules about soup rather than following the more pragmatic way of the Japanese (and likely other parts of Asia). As someone who is actually better with chopsticks than a spoon (I often manage to spill things on my shirt), it would save me a few stains to just up-end the bowl.

The Japanese way of drinking soup from the bowl rather than precariously ladling it up to our mouths with a spoon makes a good deal of sense, and I'll miss living in a culture in which this is considered correct manners.

Won't Miss #440 - soup slurping

This is Soup Curry from Dominika in Shinjuku. It is awesome, and unslurpable... at least until you eat all the big pieces. 

Ethnocentrism makes itself most obvious at the dinner table. It's one of the few places that people can feel 100% justified in their disapproval. It seems that humans decided a long time ago that the consumption of food must be full of rules and every culture has different rules. From the time of childhood, we're told not to put our elbows on the table, not to play with our food, not to talk with our mouth full, and what to do with our utensils. With all of that open and often finger-wagging from the day we could sit at a table and eat, is it any wonder we feel it's okay to disapprove of the way others are eating? One of the big things we're encouraged not to do in the West is eat noisily and then you come to Japan and people are supposed to slurp their soup.

This is an utterly ethnocentric and small thing and I know that I should be bigger than that, but the bottom line is that I really don't enjoy the sound of other people loudly consuming their food and I won't miss soup slurping.