Emma’s food pet peeves: people who cut their spaghetti

I eat often, a lot and with great pleasure, and then I quite regularly notice things. Often they’re positive things, but it also frequently happens that something irritates me immensely. Whether that’s justified or not, sometimes I just need to vent. Hence this column: Emma’s food pet peeves, with this week’s etiquette issue: people who cut their spaghetti.

My mother still proudly tells the story of how she was once sitting in a restaurant with two-year-old Emma, and I was eating my spaghetti so neatly that other guests kept coming over to compliment her. A toddler who already ate her pasta so neatly with a spoon and fork—what an achievement! What. An. Upbringing. (I’m doing a slow clap in my head now.)

Crass boor
I don’t know whether it’s because of this wonderful story from my childhood or because Italy is one of the countries I visit most often. Table manners are much less important to me than they are to my mother. People shouldn’t sit across from me smacking their lips disgustingly, but if someone feels like slurping soup from a bowl or eating with their hands, they should go right ahead. Still, my neck hairs stand on end when I see someone being served a perfect plate of spaghetti and then starting to cut into it with their knife like a crass boor. Why would you do that?

Complicated?
Is spaghetti really that difficult to eat without cutting it first? Italians eat their pasta with a fork—just a fork, not even a spoon! For convenience, many Dutch people have added a spoon as well. If an Italian can manage it with just a fork, surely we should be able to manage it with a spoon too? I don’t understand what’s going wrong here. Ideally, I’d like to see everyone eat it with just a fork, but I understand that’s completely unrealistic.

I love strands
Spaghetti is called spaghetti for a reason. Long strands whose ends you always still have to slurp up—that’s delicious, isn’t it? As soon as you cut those strands into pieces and work them into your mouth with a spoon, that entire aspect disappears. If you want to eat bites of pasta off a spoon, you might as well just buy macaroni, right?

I know people who cut spaghetti aren’t hurting anyone and should eat however they like. I don’t want to judge anyone either, but please don’t sit across from me. Thanks in advance.

https://youtu.be/-itjy2QgGus

Also read:

• Is spaghetti really Italian?
• This is what the hole in the spaghetti spoon is for
• Spaghetti with crispy breadcrumbs