In a Vietnamese family meal, the are in the middle and everybody them.
There is one bowl of rice for each person, however the fish, the vegetables and the soup to the table.
The youngest person often invites the others to eat before the meal begins.
Children learn early that they should take food from the side of a dish, not from the middle.
My grandmother taught me one rule: put the best piece in somebody else's bowl.
Foreign friends sometimes find the shared strange, the shared soup.
In restaurants in the city, more people now order one plate for one person.
My uncle thinks this is cleaner and more modern; my grandmother thinks it is the end of the family meal.
Both are right in a way, because a shared dish is not only food: it is a form of .
When four people take from the same plate, everybody must the others.