Which Hand? On Food and the Rehearsal of Power

The Neutral Hand

Contemporary food writing talks endlessly about hands, but rarely asks which hand.

When eating with hands is framed as uncivilised, rebuttals follow. Articles circulate explaining how the practice enhances digestion, activates the five senses, reconnects us to something ancient and authentic. What was once branded as uncivilised is rehabilitated through science.

But this version of the hand is strangely neutral — untouched by discipline, unmarked by hierarchy, as though its correction were purely practical.

Rehearsal

Most gestures are taught before they are celebrated — which hand reaches, how food is gathered, when a wrist is quietly redirected. How to sit. How to speak. The body absorbs instruction long before it understands what it is absorbing.

Anyone who has trained their body knows how this works. Repeat a movement long enough — a free throw before sunrise, scales practiced until the fingers move without thought — and it becomes instinct. Social training works in much the same way.

What appears as care or custom can, through repetition, become structure. Which is power.

The table is not trivial. It is rehearsal — long before it became content, it was a site of correction.

Rehearsal makes hierarchy feel natural, and what feels natural scales.

The training is rarely symmetrical.

The left hand, for instance, is often corrected — not because it cannot hold food, but because it carries other meanings. Meanings that travel — through religion, schooling, and the quiet infrastructures of empire.

From across the table, someone asks for the food. The left hand moves instinctively — and pauses mid-air, remembering a rule it never chose.

Memory, here, is instruction.

Neutrality

When something is treated as neutral, the forces that shaped it fade from view. What fades from view continues undisturbed.

This logic does not stop at the kitchen.

It extends to wellness cultures extracting turmeric without lineage.To restaurants that market authenticity while obscuring the labor and migration that produced it.To institutions that showcase diversity without redistributing power.

Neutrality does not dissolve structure. It stabilizes it.

Food carries land, labor, caste, migration, empire — whether or not those words are spoken in the room. To stage a meal is to stage those inheritances.

Form does not lighten weight.

Surface is seductive. But optics are not inquiry.

From Table to Institution

Listening to Bad Table Manners changed how I saw the table. Meher Varma examines culinary gesture as social structure — tracing how caste, labor, and domestic design quietly organize what appears natural.

The table is not aesthetic backdrop; it is evidence.

That distinction matters.

The question is not whether gathering can be art.

It is whether the rehearsals embedded in gathering are being examined — or merely staged.

What feels natural in private becomes policy in public.

Return

Return to the left hand.

If repetition can install hierarchy, repetition can also expose it.

What is rehearsed can be revised.

Understanding how power enters the body — through correction, through custom, through what we are told is neutral — makes that training visible.

And what becomes visible can be questioned.

The left hand matters not because of etiquette.

It matters because it reveals how early instruction becomes instinct, and how instinct becomes structure.

From across the table, someone asks for the food.

The left hand moves.

This time, it does not withdraw.

This essay extends questions first explored in Before Consent, There Was The Kitchen, where domestic rehearsal was examined as the origin of structure.

To follow how these gestures travel — across food, sound, film, and public gathering — continue with Archives in Motion.

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Jonah Batambuze is a Ugandan-American interdisciplinary artist and cultural architect working across installation, film, writing, and education. His practice examines Black–South Asian entanglements, diasporic memory, and the afterlives of caste and colonialism, using ritual, gesture, and archival inquiry as material.

As founder of the BlindianProject, Batambuze develops long-form artistic and educational works that challenge systems of erasure while proposing new frameworks for cultural recognition and solidarity.

Batambuze speaks and facilitates internationally on Black–South Asian solidarities, caste and colonial legacies, diasporic identity, and cultural resistance.

For speaking engagements, workshops, or media inquiries:

jonah@blindian-project.com