![\"blog-2007-Cooking-CIMG2845.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/12\/blog-2007-Cooking-CIMG2845.jpg\")
<\/strong>Whenever there was a soup dish on the table my mum would always request that we drink our soup politely and without slurping. Whenever one of us forgot, she’d remark pointedly, “he tang xiao sheng yi dian”, which translated literally means “drink soup a little quieter”. Likewise, when we were eating, the right way to do so was to chew without swankering it around in the mouth and making a din.<\/p>\nThese lessons were ingrained in the three of us so it pretty much became natural behavior. Because of how our mum told us to adopt proper table manners, at least for me, I grew up assuming that the only and proper way of eating soup was to drink it quietly.<\/p>\n
So, when I first saw \/ heard (take yer pick!) Ling drinking soup, and it went:<\/p>\n
“SSSLLLLUUURRRRRPPPP”<\/p>\n
I looked at her in abject horror! Now, Ling explained that no one at home ever told her that soup should be drunk otherwise. So, I went about looking around the topic of slurping, and it was quite a surprising find. Apparently, some Asians\u2014especially the Japanese\u2014think that sucking air as you drink soup adds to the taste.<\/p>\n
Now, maybe I should ask some of my colleagues over at the Applied Sciences School (they teach food nutrition there) whether there’s any sort of biological basis to this. Oh yeah I could search online, but in this case I’d go with people who should really <\/em>know. I certainly think there’s some cultural element to this, and definitely some sort of psychological effect. But in terms of etiquette, slurping is never considered polite, as this author says<\/a>.<\/p>\n Be that as it may and maybe this sounds very elitist. But I honestly believe that air should only enter one’s body through the nose and not the mouth. And the loud, sucking-air slurping sound is the sort of sound that makes my hair stand in roughly the same way as say, scratching nails on a blackboard.<\/p>\n It’s sort of funny now. Because whenever my nephews are at Lentor for dinner and we’re also there, I see my mum teaching them the same Foo Family Table Etiquette (FATE ™) as she did for me from 30 years ago. I’m pretty certain when our own kids are old enough to dine on the family table, I’ll be passing on these very same lessons to them then too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the things about us three boys growing up at Lentor was in our conduct at family dinners. My mum insisted that we would always have meals together as a family. It wasn’t too difficult early on when we<\/p>\n