In Pakistan, in South Asia, in large parts of Africa, in the Middle East, and in Southeast Asia, eating with hands is neither strange nor “uncivilised”. It is a cultural system, rooted in geography, climate, ingredient type, and centuries of food philosophy.
Yet, even today, in our workplaces, social gatherings, and elite urban restaurant spaces, we hear casual remarks that eating rice with hands is “dirty”, while eating a burger or pizza with hands is perfectly acceptable and considered modern. The contradiction is not accidental. It is inherited. And it is colonial.
The colonial project did not only militarise, depopulate, extract, and administratively reorganise; it also ranked, graded, and classified bodies, languages, aesthetics, habits, and food. The coloniser’s hierarchy taught that European etiquette and European food manners signalled civilisation, while indigenous eating practices were framed as primitive, unhygienic, and lacking refinement.
It has been nearly eight decades since the empire formally left this region, but the moral hierarchies of what is considered “acceptable” or “civilised” dining remain deeply embedded. Eating rice with hands is mocked because the colonial project mocked it. Eating a burger with your hands is normal because it is Western, and because Western practices were positioned as superior.
This social double standard still maps onto our daily lived spaces. In many Pakistani workplaces, a person eating rice or curry with their hands will be subtly, and sometimes openly, judged. They will be read as less educated and less civilised. They will be interpreted as less “professional” or less “exposed” or “kept protected”.
The same workplaces and social gatherings will consider someone eating pizza, steak, sandwiches, or sliders with bare hands as perfectly normal because those foods are valorised by global media, Western marketing, and internationalised urban culture.
If exclusionary colonial food hierarchies still exist today in Pakistan’s workplaces, it is because institutional leadership has not intervened to de-normalise them
This is not about hygiene. This is about hierarchy, structured politics, discrimination, and mindset. Eating with hands is not a random, eccentric practice invented to be exotic. It is a deeply practical technology. Eating rice and gravies with hands increases control over texture and temperature.
In many South Asian, Arab, and Southeast Asian food cultures, the index, middle, and ring fingers create a natural tasting tool. This is how a person can mix rice, lentils, vegetables, spices, and relishes to assemble one complete flavour profile in each bite. It is a sensory practice, not simply a delivery mechanism.
Yet the colonial lens stripped this practice of its sophistication. They branded it as “unclean”, not because it was unclean, but because it was different. That branding was then internalised by colonised societies and passed across generations. We still, to this day, echo and reproduce these hierarchies in our language, in our social signalling, and in our informal judgements about who is “cultured” and who is “not”, or who is “in” and who is “out”.
When someone says, “you have no etiquette to eat” or “use a spoon, this is a formal place”, what they are actually doing is re-performing a colonial value judgement. They are marking a boundary between “modern or professional” and “traditional”. They are not talking about germs, but they are drawing identity borders. These identity borders are used to elevate some people and humiliate others.
Eating practices thus become instruments of soft discrimination and structured politics, specifically in workplaces and informal social gatherings. Food is never neutral. The body, the hand, the plate, the utensil—these are all political sites. Everything that colonialism touched, it reorganised into binaries: clean or dirty, civilised or uncivilised, mannered or ill-mannered, advanced or backward.
The tragedy is not that the British made these classifications; the tragedy is that we are still living by them, enforcing them, weaponising them against one another at workplaces and social gatherings, isolating those we intend to humiliate and torture.
We must acknowledge that even in 2025 in Pakistan, we are still too comfortable humiliating others for the most ordinary, culturally grounded habits. The habits that existed long before Europe even knew South Asia. We still treat Westernised dining practices as sophistication, and our own inherited practices as shameful.
It is time to dismantle that internalised hierarchy and for administrators to think about it and feel the pain this practice brings to those affected. Eating with hands is not a marker of poverty. It is not a marker of low education. It is not a marker of backwardness. It is a cultural logic of eating that has survived millennia.
It is evidence of continuity, of sensory intelligence, of a living food tradition. So, when we mock someone for eating with their hands, we are not simply mocking a gesture; we are mocking history, identity, and belonging. And we are repeating colonial vocabulary in the process.
The work of decolonisation does not only happen in theory, in think-tanks, in events, or in academic writings. Sometimes, it begins on the dining table. Sometimes, it begins by refusing shame. Sometimes, it begins simply by defending something as fundamental as the right to eat our own food in our own way without being judged for it.
It is a multi-actor chain of responsibility and accountability. Historical colonial categories were introduced externally, but their persistence today is a direct result of internal reproduction. Therefore, the obligation to dismantle these hierarchies is not abstract; it is institutional.
Leaders, executives, HR functions, and administrative structures within organisations carry direct accountability to break these embedded biases. They shape organisational culture, set behavioural norms, and implicitly signal what is acceptable and what is not.
In other words, if exclusionary colonial food hierarchies still exist today in Pakistan’s workplaces, it is because institutional leadership has not intervened to de-normalise them.