habits

[incandescens]

The question came up at work today of sharing food around.

Well, sort of. I'd bought some mince pies from a charity stall in the street, and was offering them around, and muttered, a bit embarrassed, that it was a habit I'd learned at boarding school.

But you know, it's true.

Imagine a boarding school environment, with a lot of usually hungry pupils (boarding school food isn't bad, but it's rarely the sort of thing you eat to overfilling), in a situation where people didn't share their private stores of food around to at least some degree. Exactly. Bad feeling would root.

It wasn't that one necessarily expected friends to take all the food, or even that you shared around everything. If you had some fruit, you kept that for yourself or offered a piece to a friend. If you had a heavily wrapped chunk of fruit cake, you normally just carved off a hunk for yourself. If you were on your own, or sharing a cubicle with someone else, you weren't expected to go round offering stuff to the whole dormitory.

But if you were in a dayroom or surrounded by a medium-sized group of friends, and had just opened a packet of biscuits, or a bag of sweets, or just got out a big sponge cake that wasn't going to last, then it was -- appropriate, I suppose -- to inquire generally whether anyone would like something. In return, nobody tried to grab too big a piece, nobody would have taken your last biscuit or sweet, and they in their turn would have shared. Also, later depredations on the biscuits/sweets were your own; it was just the first hand-around that was expected.

It probably wasn't like that in all boarding schools, or even in all the boarding houses, but that's how I remember it being in my House and my boarding school.

And that's why, when I pick up a packet of biscuits or a small box of mince pies on my way into work, and it comes to elevenses and I break it open, I offer them round.

(But later on, they're mine, all mine.)

---

Two Tanka

From outside my house,
only the faint distant sound
of gentle breezes
wandering through bamboo leaves
in the long evening silence.

Late evening finally
comes: I unlatch the door
and quietly
await the one
who greets me in my dreams.

-- Otomo No Yakamochi, (718-785), translated by Sam Hamill

Comments

[mikeneko.livejournal.com]

f you had a heavily wrapped chunk of fruit cake, you normally just carved off a hunk for yourself.

And some for your enemies?

I do like fruitcakes, but I've never met anyone else who did. :)

[incandescens]

My mother made/makes good fruit cakes. :) Some of my friends used to appreciate them, but had to be lured into trying the first chunk.

And, very importantly for a boarding situation, fruit cakes could last for weeks.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Very importantly...

I think once I actually tried fruit cake made from real, dried fruit (not the funny pickled green things or horrible Yellow chunks of non-discript stuff) and lots of good, toasted nuts, sometimes some nice chocolate chunks, and a decently firm cake with good rum basting I got hooked on fruit cake, but previous to that, I think I would have been as dubious as other Americans.

[xsmoonshine.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure, maybe it's a cultural thing, but hereabouts, if you're having some finger food in the company of friends - cake, cookies, fries, candy - it's customary to offer them around too. =)

[incandescens]

Maybe it's that I do it to anyone nearby in the office, rather than just friends. Friends would be, as you say, automatic.

(It's a big open-plan office; the few people sitting close to me would probably count as friends, the rest of the office not so much.)

[archangelbeth]

It's your Lilim nature coming to the fore, clearly.

(No, I'm not saying if it's Bright or dark Lilim nature...)

[incandescens]

(eyes you) At least we can be quite sure which sort you are, madam.

[archangelbeth]

The obnoxious kind!

[liralen.livejournal.com]

It's interesting. I do that, now, not just for friends, but for anyone that wanders by the office cubby, too. Not on the street or whatever, but at work. I would call it an extension of my days at Caltech and the U.W., though, and it also extends to anything I bake. I will often just bake and bring stuff in for anyone to take just because it's far too much for my family, even, to eat.

But the habit of baking that much comes from something of the same situation at the dorms, i.e. anything I made was going to be better than what came out of the cafeteria, so it just is automatic for me to make enough to share and then do so...

Thing is that, for me, it doesn't happen when I buy something, so that's interesting, too. As mine stemmed from being the sole (okay... 1 in 7 and then 1 in 100) purveyor of such treats, not a general habit in all things sharable.