Katie doesn't share food...at least that was until I came to India

This is just a reconstruction of an empty plate and not the actual plate of
potato curry mentioned in this post

My work has a really nice daily routine of everyone breaking for lunch around the same time and eating lunch together in the office. It’s great because it’s given me the opportunity to get to know people better and vice versa. What slightly flawed me on the first day though was that everyone got out their tiffins and tupperware and rather than tucking into their own food, they turned to their neighbour and started taking forkfuls of their food. I thought at first that perhaps this was a pre-arranged thing, that the day before they’d all had a discussion, one person had said “I’ll bring the dahl if you bring the masala dosa.” As it turns out, this is just the accepted way of eating. You bring your food but it’s also perfectly acceptable if you like the look of someone else’s food to stick your fork right in without uttering a word. 

Now it’s not so much that I don’t share food. I’m totally fine with it if there is a pre-agreed arrangement of food sharing, for example, a buffet, a picnic, ordering in take away. But there are certain occasions such as when I order my favourite dish in a restaurant, or bring my lunch into work, when generally sharing doesn’t come into it. The general principal being, if you like the look of what I ordered then you should have ordered it for yourself, or if you like the look of my sandwich then I’ll recommend the ingredients but please don’t take mine.

However, I’ve sort of grown to like the idea of this lunch sharing and I realised this today when for the first time one of my colleagues asked to try the homemade potato and lentil curry I’d brought with me. It was a real moment of triumph and I felt like I’d finally managed to integrate into the inner lunch circle. After several weeks of being given pitying looks for my odd lunch choices of cucumber and cheese spread sandwiches with chilli chutney, and my first attempt at making a curry which looked like watery cement with bits of potato floating in it, I’d finally made something that someone else wanted me to share with them.