my favorite movie scene

Eating pho tonight made me remember this classic scene from the Japanese film "Tampopo" (1985).

This is a movie about food, following the life and times of a widow who opens the perfect ramen shop. Into this main theme are woven so many mini-stories:

This scene involves a Japanese woman who is in a Western-style culinary etiquette class, and the day's lesson centers around how to eat noodles *without slurping them*. Most Eastern cultures require you to slurp your noodles, not only because of the hot temperature (except in the case of ice ramen in the summer) but because of the belief that, if you bite your noodle you will shorten your life: long noodles=long life. Anyhow, the setting is a spaghetti house in which the class is set up in a banquet room, with the teacher giving a long explanation of how rude it is to slurp your noodles when eating Western-style food. While she is talking, there is a man sitting at a nearby table, obliviously slurping away at his spaghetti, interrupting the teacher every time she emphasizes the importance of non-slurping. So her entire class takes forks in hand and begin to attempt to eat these Western-style noodles without slurping, looking very meek and uncertain of themselves, all the while the man nearby is slurping happily at his. One by one, the students of the class start to slyly slurp their spaghettis until the entire banquet room erupts into a massive slurp-down, at which point the instructor yields to the pressure and starts to slurp her spaghetti noodles, too.

Why did I think of this? Because my daughter is *really* good at slurping her noodles, a fact we discovered over our pho dinner tonight (to which, I might add, I rather violently reacted to...I'm going to have to make my own from now on).

More on slurping found on my sister blog, http://nakanojofurusato.blogspot.com
(memoirs of a geisha-wannabe).