My cousins from Canada came to visit for the summer in 1987. My mother got us pizza for lunch. As my sisters and I digged happily into our slices, the cousins stared at their plates in bewildered puzzlement.

“Where’s the knife and fork?” asked the Cousin with the soda bottle lenses.

“You don’t need them,” I said.

“How are you supposed to eat the food then?” questioned the confused Cousin with the Dorothy Hammill haircut.

“You pick it up and eat like this.” My sister picked up her slice with two hands, fold the wider end in the center, and bit off a mouthful on the tapered end.

“Eat with your hands?!” the cousins asked incredulously.

“That’s the way everyone eats pizza.” I said.

The prim cousins looked at their lunch perplexedly, trying to figure how to best approach this low-brow fare challenge. Soda-bottle Lenses lifted the plate to his mouth and nibbled at the pizza. Dorothy Hammill Hair used her finger tips to hover her slice about an inch off the plate, trying her best to work at it with utmost dignity and pinky fingers out.

And I wondered how these two cousins, who grew up in the Western world, influenced by Western cultures, managed to reach school age without knowing how to eat pizza.

A few years later I came across an Ann Landers column in which a finishing school graduate said the proper way to eat a banana is to slice it in half length-wise, serve on a plate, and spoon the fruit out of its skin. This way is considered “much more elegant than holding the banana, stripping the skin and looking like a monkey.”

Then I understood what school my cousins came from.

[originally published on LiveJournal]