Most of the social etiquette surrounding food pertains to the form of eating that involves a knife and fork. When food is served on a plate, when someone uses a spatula to assign you a portion and places it on the plate in front of you, most people understand what’s expected of them.

But when it comes to what I call “community” consumption, that is, food that gets passed around on a plate or in a bag or that sits in a bowl or a lid-less Tupperware or an aluminum tray, most of the people you know will lose their mind.

“Community” eating, which it turns out is almost always snacking, is society’s most pervasive form of the honor system – at least that’s what it’s supposed to be. Here you have open containers of food that are free for the taking, maybe a plate of nachos or a basket of cookies or perhaps a bowl of chips or nuts. No one’s watching you (well, I am), you’re on your honor.

The expectation is that you won’t make a pig of yourself, that you won’t fill your pockets and head off into the night like a fuckin’ squirrel with its cheeks bulging. In a free and democratic society, there are other expectations we have of one another in a community snacking environment where, in almost all circumstances, people are welcome to use their hands and fingers as substitutes for forks and spoons. At the top of that list of expectations is that you only come in physical contact with that item YOU are gonna consume.

This is where society fails badly. This is where community snacking devolves into a quagmire of germ infestation and soiled, broken snacks left in the wake of thoughtless, appalling snacking etiquette.

Let’s take a closer look.

Here’s a gal approaching a crystal bowl of fresh jelly beans recently purchased during the Easter season. She reaches in for a taste that results in a chubby handful of maybe twenty-five beans. She clearly has experience using her hand as an auxiliary food shovel.

Now she looks the beans over, and as the colorful candy starts to stain her hand she starts to put some of them back in the bowl.

“No, no! What goes on here?”
“I’m putting some back.”
“You can’t do that, you touched all of them with your grimy hands.”
“But I don’t like some of these flavors.”
“Tough shit, move along.”

Rule #1 … If you’re a big pig you can take a large handful from a community snacking container, but you can never put shit back once you’ve touched it. Eat it, throw it away or put it in your pocket so your fat ass can have a snack for later.

What have we here? It’s a plate of wings being passed around and it’s made its way to the guy with the John Deere cap. He’s touched one wing but put it back on the plate now he’s prodding a second wing, now a third.

“No, no! What goes on here?”
“I’m looking for the wing with most meat on it.”
“Fuck that, you don’t look with your hands.”
“It’s no big deal, the spicy wing sauce will neutralize any germs.”
“Listen, Farmer Fred, this is a civilized party, not a hoedown.”

Rule #2 … We all make bad choices in life. Sometimes that means we have to work in the sanitation industry and other times it means we have to eat a chicken wing that doesn’t have much meat on it. If you’re the type that has trouble making decisions, then community snacking may not be for you.

On the table is a big Tupperware filled with Chex Mix. A college girl is standing over it and she’s using her index finger as a stir-stick, flipping everything around in the bowl as if searching for an answer to some snacking riddle.

“No, no! What goes on here?”
“I don’t like the almonds or the pretzels.”
“No one does, but that doesn’t give you license to touch everything in the bowl.”
“Well, I washed my hands!”
“Well, I brushed my teeth, but that doesn’t mean I can start licking the Chex Mix.”

Rule #3 … Deciding to participate in community snacking means that you agree to accept the snacks the way they are. You can’t use your grubby little fingers to create new snacks or to separate the snacks into new little snack herds based on your personal preference. And don’t think that just because you use one dainty little finger that everything’s okay … that finger is attached to that hand and that hand is dirty as hell.

Here we have homemade chocolate chip cookies arranged with care, one piled on top of the others. For some reason, this kid can’t just pick one off the top. He apparently has see-thru-cookie vision and finds the best one under all of the others … of course, now he’s made physical contact with thirteen other cookies.

“No, no! What goes on here?”
“I see the biggest cookie down there, that’s the one I want.”
“Why can’t you just take one from the top and come back later for another.”
“Someone else might take it.”
“Yeah, and someone might die from the botulism you just transmitted to all of the other cookies.”

Rule #4 … No one said community snacking was easy. There’s strategy involved and a certain degree of dexterity. It’s smart to take your time to determine what wing or what cookie or what section of nachos you want to grab … but you have to go straight in and avoid touching surrounding food elements. Imagine it’s like that claw game in Toy Story, once you lower the claw onto a cookie, that’s your cookie.

We should all remember that rules exist to maintain some semblance of order in a modern society. Without them, much of what you eat would be picked over and pawed at and touched by friends of questionable character and strangers of questionable hygiene …

We just can’t have that.

Photo credit: Onno B. on Visualhunt.com/ CC BY-NC-SA