"It’s impolite to preserve your plate as private property..."

Hate Read #1: I hate not sharing food at restaurants.

Hulu obviously

Unless you are five (but really, before then, too) anything that you order at a restaurant is communal property of the table. If you didn’t hear the waiter already, we now live in a small-plates society. Sharing is a necessity. Sharing is a commandment! If your toddler’s chicken fingers look good, I am going to eat one. I will dip my spoon into your soup. I will sip your cocktail. I will reach over and saw off a piece of steak. This may be considered impolite, but actually, it’s impolite to preserve your plate as private property. I thought we were all aspirational socialists here. 

Some people want to order a series of dishes for purely their own enjoyment: appetizer, entree, dessert. Where do you think we are, the corner booth at Applebee’s, flipping through the plastic binder? Are you afraid the food will…run out? Or that it won’t be possible to place another order in the future? (That should be the next line after the “small plates” and “things will come out when they’re ready” warnings from waitstaff: If you’re still hungry, you can always order more.) A restaurant is not an emergency. Dinner is a group endeavor. 

Not sharing food at restaurants is antisocial, and possibly ahistorical, if you think about it. Most of the world’s great cuisines are premised on family-style dining, not pristinely composed singular plates. This was underlined to me recently while watching The Taste of Things, a movie that makes real food look as appetizing as any Studio Ghibli version. Even though the rustic recipes were plated individually, the dishes themselves were large-format, as the menu vocab goes: whole fish, pot au feu, seafood pie. This is a food film that understands that sharing is the point. Consuming the same thing together, whether a bottle of wine or lettuce pulled from the garden, is a gift.

Not sharing food strips the meal of its role as a communal experience. What are we going to talk about? How creamy your risotto that I apparently cannot touch is? No. Not sharing food is like going to the movies with a big crew and then splitting off for separate theaters, watching completely different movies, and then meeting up again. You can discuss what you’ve each seen, but then what was the point of going together in the first place?

Granted, group ordering can be logistically difficult. You have to assemble dishes that go reasonably well together. (Proviso: This applies only to dinner; communal brunch sounds gross.) Yes, people don’t always like the same things, though most restaurants have a finite number of actually good menu items. (If you want the plastic binder, you know where to go). And if you have dietary restrictions, just order enough of what you can eat, and then make everyone split the bill. (To be clear, not splitting the bill equally is even ruder than not sharing your food!)

What do you think the neanderthals did when they brought down a nice, juicy wooly mammoth? They roasted huge chunks of it over a fire and then took turns grabbing at that prehistoric asado in humanity’s first large-format meal. Was Ryan J. Caveman specifically requesting his own mammoth bavette with some frites and aioli? Absolutely not. —Taylor Mille-Feuille