Cultural: Fun Food things

I was trying to think of a “fun” cultural post.

Not something heavy or big and even really important.

Cultural differences I still find them fascinating. OK, OK, sometimes they are frustrating when they cause tension. But these aren’t that kind of thing.

We all come from different places and family backgrounds. Hence, what was normal for me growing up may or may not be what you experienced.

However, I did go to a Christian school growing up and helped in a lot of various activities with regards to kitchens and eating in the states. My point? I saw a lot of other kids and other families and spent quite a bit of time in various kitchens - my own, my mom’s, many church kitchens, and others’ homes as well. I even worked as a cook for a preschool briefly.

Here are 3 little things that I noticed when I came here.

The very first one -

Eating bananas

I always ate bananas by pulling the stem and breaking it apart and eating from what I thought of as the top down.

The first time I saw a neighbor girl eating a banana what I thought of as “upside down” was actually surprising to me. I’d never seen anyone eat one that way.

Since then I’ve read that it is actually the “right way”.

The second one -

Slicing Tomatoes

I always thought you cut out the stem part with the point of your knife and slice them like this - so the slices look like this: This is slicing horizontally.

I’ve been here a while now and I’ve never actually seen a Polish person slice them like that.

They do it this way - and I’ve not really seen them cut out the stem part out - they just seem to cut through it and somehow it’s fine. This is sliced up and down - what I think of as vertically!

And the last one is one that my husband and I noticed only recently! It’s actually amazing that we’ve not seen it before and only noticed it two times lately.

Eating French fries with ketchup.

Americans tend to eat them in one of a variety of ways. First of all, we do use a lot of ketchup. Either we dip the fries in ketchup by having a little sort of bucket or we can use the box to sort of “hold the ketchup" as shown below.

or we spread the ketchup all around:

But what we’ve seen recently is this: Someone holding the little packet of ketchup in one hand with a small hole in it and spreading it in a thin line along a fry and then putting that fry into his/her mouth. Repeat.

Like this:

I guess the biggest plus about that is that it makes you savor each bite and eat slowly! And to be fair - we’ve only recently noticed it and only by a couple of people!

And there you are - three very small food related cultural differences (at least from MY family to what I’ve seen here)!

I know - none of these are important - just a little something to make you smile today!

Have a great day wherever you are reading this!

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Be sure to check out what my sis has for you in the store!

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