Well, sometimes if I go out to dinner with my family, people will come up to me and put their hand across my plate for me to shake, sometimes when I have a bite of food in my mouth. I find this a bit disturbing.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I hate it when people come up to me when I'm eating.
When someone watches us eating, we feel exposed. We might also harbor a suspicion that the person staring wants to steal food from our plate. The taboo, in any case, is long-standing.
Many people see the chance to eat something for nothing, without the need to cook or wash up, as the great consolation of going out to dinner. But they forget quite how difficult it is to talk to a stranger and eat at the same time.
One of the rudest things you can do, food-wise, is to stare at someone in the act of eating. It draws attention to the unseemly fact that eating is a bodily function - like animals, we are trapped by our hungers, but we do our best to disguise them with such civilized props as menus and forks.
It's kind of awkward to eat alone in a restaurant because everybody's looking at me.
If I go to a restaurant, other people stare. The meal is ruined.
Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use.
You're in the public eye and you just hope that people don't come up and interrupt you while your in the middle of a meal or a conversation or something like that.
I don't like going to dinner by myself; I'll call for delivery before I do that. It's awkward if you're at a table all alone. I'm sure nobody even notices, but there's something about it.
I eat with my hands when I am home alone!