As we share the meal together, it’s a tradition and a good hygiene practice to use communal spoons to move food from the shared central dishes onto your own personal dish. The spoons are placed in each food dish for you to take the food and put on your rice plate. These spoons are traditionally shorter than your usual eating spoon. We avoid using our personal cutlery (which has been in our mouths) to touch the food on the shared dishes.
Rice pots have their own serving spoons and a large soup bowl or pot will come with a ladle.
So make sure you don’t use your eating spoon to scoop the food being shared on the table. It’s a common table manner in Thailand and good practice for hygiene.
Being considerate is one of the key manners in Thai’s value. Meat was traditionally rare, while vegetables in abundance. That’s why most Thai dishes consist of meat and lots of vegetables. So if you’re invited for a meal in a Thai home, and even though you love shrimps, you shouldn’t just sweep those shrimps off the Tom Yam pot and leave only the soup and mushrooms for the others. Unless your host insists, take proportionally a bit of everything. This applies to the amount of food on the table as well. If you don’t see a buffet line, keep the pace with the others.
Oh, and serving food onto someone else’s rice plate is quite common. In fact it is respectful and shows that you care. So you’ll often see a daughter scooping fish off the bone and placing it on her father’s plate, or a gentleman scooping a piece of prime chicken breast onto his date’s plate, or a husband putting the shrimp heads onto his wife’s plate. That’s not uncommon; the shrimp head is the prized part of the crustacean.
