Does how you eat tell people what you are like?

No I don't think I'm quite this bad, though I have to say that I frequently drop some tiny bit of food on my clothes. If it's new and pale coloured then it's inevitable. Does this mean I'm careless, slapdash and messy? Well in some ways yes, and in some ways no - and I will return to this.

I was sitting in the sunshine in the garden eating my small pot of yoghurt for lunch. It's a fasting day so I'm not allowed much and frankly I'm getting a bit fed up with it. I am tantalisingly near my target weight of 60kg but seem to be permanently stuck around half a kilo away. I have been telling myself that when I reach my target I shall reduce to one day a week of fasting, but I sometimes think I shall never get there. It means I don't cook as much as I would like, because, ironically, I can't be bothered to cook something small for just me.

Anyway it does mean that I savour every little bit of what I am eating. In this instance it was yoghurt. Now the yoghurts I eat are from Aldi and consist of plain, but I think sweetened, yoghurt with a topping of some jammy like fruit. I love the passionfruit one especially by the way. To savour this I run my spoon around the edge so that a little bit of the jam slides into the yoghurt underneath and I continue like this all the way through the little carton. It reminded me of the way I drink a cappuccino - again I run my spoon around the edge of the frothy milk, lick what I have retrieved from the spoon and then drink a bit of the coffee. I know this probably makes me sound a little bit weird, maybe even OCD, and possibly ill-mannered and maybe I am, but then I suspect that most of us have some little idiosyncrasies when it comes to eating food. (Like hanging up washing.)

Mine have changed over the years I think, although perhaps some things have stayed the same.

When I was very young - maybe around 8 or 10 I went through a phase of mashing everything on the plate together before I ate it - which sounds rather revolting. I don't go to such extremes these days, but I do mix sauce or gravy, if there is some, with other parts of the dish - maybe the potatoes or rice, maybe the meat or fish - whatever it seems is most suitable I guess. If you have flatbread with tandoori chicken - do you dip the bread in the sauce (if there is some), just take a bit every now and then, use it as a sort of shovel, or make a wrap with the chicken, some salad and maybe a relish? When we eat our version of tandoori chicken at home with the family I think all of those variations come into play.

Before I started visiting France I always used to eat with a knife and fork as I was taught to do - at school lunches the teachers used to patrol the tables and tell you off if you were not eating 'properly'. But in France they just used a fork mostly (unless it was steak or something else that needed cutting) and they actually wiped the plate clean with bread! I still occasionally wipe the plate clean with bread - and I don't think it is considered quite as impolite as it once was to do so, but I do mostly eat with just a fork - unless it's something that requires cutting. Why? Well a knife is mostly redundant isn't it? And bread is very much better than your fingers for wiping the plate clean, or even worse, just leaving what you cannot retrieve with the rice, potatoes or pasta on the plate.

Of course eating etiquette is different everywhere. Even the Asians do not use their chopsticks the same way throughout Asia, and it varies between classes and ages too, but I suspect that we all have little personal quirks that we mostly keep to ourselves - like my yoghurt routine - but there are some which are common to different groups. For example - the speed at which we eat, whether we separate everything out or mix it all up, do you save the best to last - whatever that might be? I certainly used to keep the potatoes until last when I was young. Best to get what you might not like so much out of the way rather than leaving it with nothing else to follow to take the taste away. I found an interesting article in the English Daily Mail by Juliet A. Boghossian - yes the Daily Mail is not an upmarket, 'intellectual' paper but it was really quite interesting.

It decreed that there were nine basic types of eaters - slow, fast, organiser, isolationist, mixer, oversharer, preparer, adventurer and picky. Some of these titles are obvious, but others are not. An organiser for example separates out all the different types of food, an oversharer doesn't really care about the correct etiquette, a preparer cuts it all up before eating ... And the article goes on to link the way we eat with the kind of person we are. So have a read - it's not very long - or deep - just like me, but food for thought if you will pardon the pun.

If you look up eating food there are absolutely endless articles on what you should be eating to be healthy, and also a lot of articles with similarly endless lists of do's and don'ts about how to eat. Not much about what it says about you though. And I confess I am slightly worried about this. The yoghurt is a bit anal, and the messy spaghetti is a bit slapdash - so who am I really?

I do think that how we eat our food at home, on our own or in company are three different things - maybe there are four - eating in the company of friends and/or family, and eating in a posh restaurant may be two different things after all. Whether it says anything about your personality I'm not so sure.

So how do you eat your yoghurt?