Chapter 3: Eating and Drinking Together

Overview

On one level, eating and drinking is simply about survival . But on another level, sharing food and drink is a social activity, an experience that forges links between people and brings them closer together.

It s not surprising, then, that when businesspeople are trying to make new contacts or cement old ones that eating and drinking come into the picture. This is especially true in cultures that put a lot of emphasis on interpersonal relationships, including the countries of the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Southern Europe. A formal dinner or banquet means that people have to spend at least a couple of hours in each others company without talking business, which in high-tech, fast-moving Western cultures like the U.S. and Canada is in itself a novelty. The food provides the perfect topic of conversation; it gives people something to discuss without the risk of upsetting anyone (unless you are tactless enough to make disparaging remarks about a local delicacy).

Formal dining, like all rituals, entails strict patterns of behavior. For example, at a dinner in Japan or South Korea you should fill your neigh-bor s glass but not your own (see Letter 52), and when taking afternoon tea in England you should eat your scone after your sandwich but before your cake. These actions are not important in themselves , but as a part of a shared ritual they bring people closer together, and they may even mark a change in the relationship between host and guest ”from stranger to acquaintance or acquaintance to business partner.

The opposite of the formal dinner or banquet (slow food?) must be fast food, and for people who take food and the rituals surrounding them seriously, like the French and Chinese, fast food may be seen as a threat to a whole way of life. To some French people, a McDonald s opening in town is no less than a menace to civilization as they know it! We can all get passionate about what we eat and drink, but if you don t come from the culture in question, the excitement generated is incomprehensible. The English can actually quarrel about whether it s better to put the milk in the cup before the tea is poured or after . Malaysians wait in eager anticipation to taste the first durian fruit of the season (an experience one Westerner described as like eating blancmange in a toilet ), and the first ripe fruits fetch sky-high prices.

When you are abroad, accompanying a colleague to a local restaurant can mark a step forward in your relationship, but there are also pitfalls, especially if you are offered a local delicacy. For example, in Sweden there is a traditional Thursday lunch offered by most restaurants every week of the year. To non-Swedes it may seem like a rather bizarre combination: A thick pea and ham soup served with mustard, accompanied by punsch, a sort of sweet liqueur (although at workplaces the punsch is usually omitted from the menu), followed by pancakes served with jam and whipped cream. Actually, it tastes better than it sounds, and if it s really cold outside this is a wonderful way of keeping warm!

A U.S. businessman I know was visiting a large company for a week, and every day he accompanied his manager to the staff dining room, where there was self-service. On Thursday, the traditional fare was on the menu and he decided to try it. Being a polite man, the manager let his guest go before him in the queue, but unfortunately there was no indication on the food counter of the order in which the food was to be eaten. So naturally enough, the American poured the pea soup over his pancake . His Swedish manager, seeing too late what had happened and not wanting to embarrass his guest, said nothing and simply did the same. I believe they both enjoyed the meal.

I like this story because it shows that the manager had grasped the point of sharing a meal and building a relationship. In this context it wasn t really important what they ate, but that the two of them shared some non-business time and started to get to know each other. When you are eating and drinking you temporarily stop being an employee and remember that underneath the business suit you are simply a person with the same need of food and drink as everyone else. This need, and the wish to eat and drink in the company of others, is one of the common denominators of being human.

However, I do hope that as their relationship progressed the Swede felt able to tell his guest about the mistake ”pancakes really do taste better with jam and cream!

• MORAL Eating and drinking together is a reminder of our common humanity. It is a chance for a relationship to move from the purely business level to the personal.