Eating Exercise for Acting

While I was in convo today I noticed that there were many things that I was unable to see at first glance while eating. The first thing I noticed was that there are many steps involved in the eating process. First you must decide what you are going to eat. Next you must arrange it on your plate accordingly. After these steps I noticed that I take quite a while to cut up all the different items and in between I am guilty of using quite a few napkins. I also have a sort of regular timing when dealing with drinking anything and it seems to go in an alternating pattern between different portions and drinking. Another action I noticed was that many of the people at my table were involved in the stereotypical American notion of eating their food without really tasting it. I found a few people were not only eating, but reading at the same time or talking on the phone. The list goes on and on, but in short there was very little "eating" in the European sense going on. I tried to observe myself as well as the people around me while they were eating. I found several things that were very different from the exercise I did in class. One major difference was the time involved. It took me around forty-five minutes to eat dinner, which is much longer than in class. Although I know that to some extent the class exercises must be limited in the sense of time, in the future I will try to become more time conscious.