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When New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani was seen on video casually scooping up rice with his fingers earlier this year, some criticized him for his unusual eating habit.
The short video clip sparked online debate about culture, class and proper etiquette for eating certain foods.
Some pushed back on this: If eating rice with one’s hands is odd, why isn’t eating pizza or a burger perceived that way?
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“I have to eat with my hands,” the self-proclaimed Democratic socialist, who was born in Uganda, told Bon Appétit in June. “In Uganda, we even eat salad with our hands.”
After the video surfaced on social media, Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, took to X to criticize Mamdani, writing, “Civilized people in America don’t eat like this. If you refuse to adapt to Western customs, go back to the Third World.”
Whether it’s in Mamdani’s birthplace of Kampala, Uganda, or in his current home in New York City, the way someone eats carries meaning and method, BEX Kitchen executive chef Becky Geisel told Fox News Digital.
“When you’re eating with your hands, it’s about texture and sensory and temperature and quality,” the New Jersey-based chef said.
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She said eating rice by hand is prevalent in certain African cultures.
“They do have an etiquette with using their hands,” she said. “You use your right hand to eat with and then you use your left hand to pass the food with — and there’s always a washing before and after.”
In some Asian cuisines, such as Japanese and Chinese, chopsticks are used to eat rice, Geisel said.
By doing so, “they’re slowing down their eating process as well, which digestively would be a good thing, so you’re just not inhaling all this food,” she said.
A video clip recently shared by the Facebook page End Wokeness has Mamdani saying opponents’ “No. 1 issue is whether or not I eat biryani with my hands.”
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Biryani is an Indian dish made with seasoned rice and meat, fish or vegetables.
“Everybody eats with their hands, whether you’re eating chicken wings or burgers or biryani or whatever it is,” Mamdani said in the undated video.
Fox News Digital reached out to Mamdani’s campaign for comment.
Michael Puma, founder of the Gotham Burger Social Club in New York City, said he believes “there’s a time and a place” to embrace the eating etiquette of other cultures.
“It gets a little jarring if you see somebody else doing it on a subway where there’s no place to clean your hands and you might be eating with dirty hands,” Puma told Fox News Digital. “I think that’s where people kind of get triggered.”
World traveler and Florida-based author Steve Santagati agreed.
“There’s a reason why we don’t still eat with our hands,” he said. “It’s mostly hygienic.”
Santagati, who said he’s spent time in Uganda, told Fox News Digital he believes the issue of Mamdani eating rice by hand in public is more about politics than it is upholding cultural tradition.
“If that’s the culture he wants, then that’s a culture he should have stuck with,” Santagati said.
For Puma, “there’s a time and a place” to eat with your hands.
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“If you’re here in the States, we use utensils in restaurants. When you go somewhere else in another culture, they may use their hands, so I think it’s just [about] reading the room,” he said.
“I’ve been in situations where I’ve traveled overseas where everybody was eating with their hands and [the hosts] just read the room. They saw that we were Americans and brought us utensils.”
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In 2014, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio was criticized for eating pizza with a fork — a breach of what many consider an unwritten rule of being a New Yorker.
“It’s very common in Italy to eat Neapolitan-style pizza with a knife and fork because it is very thin,” Puma said.
“If you pick it up, it could be a mess. So, it’s very common for people to use a knife and fork, where here we have New York-style pizza or Sicilian-style pizza. You don’t need a knife and fork. You can pick it up and eat it, as most New Yorkers will do.”
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Although “99.9%” of customers don’t opt for utensils at Puma’s burger joint, they are available to anyone who wants to use them.
“Everybody has their own style of eating,” he said.
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