Visited a Chinese student's dorm room on campus, who has lived with an American for 4 months.Some interesting behavior patterns differences can be easily spotted in this no matter than 100 sqt space.
First thing popped into my eyes is this sunflower seeds 'energy drink'. It is a rare phenomena you may only spot here in the US. Before I explain the reason, let's tell you how American are taught to consume sunflower seeds. I quote the following instructioon from wikihow .
Steps:
1. Purchase a bag of sunflower seeds (David is very well known and the choice of baseball teams the country over).
2. Place two(2) sunflower seeds in your mouth.
3. With your tongue, move one over to your cheek (the side not being used to actively eat the seeds).
4. With your tongue, place the other seed vertically or horizontally between your teeth, depending on your preference. Either way, the outside edge of the sell should be making contact with you teeth. Use your molars (chewing teeth), because there is an indention in the middle to hold the seed.
5. Apply firm and steady pressure on the seed until it cracks.
6. Release the seed from your teeth.
7. With your tongue and teeth, separate the inner seed from the shell. The texture is the key to this step. The inner, edible seed, will be smooth, while the shell will be rough.
Spit out all of the shell pieces. (After practice, the shell will usually break open like a clam, therefor making this step less messy)
8. Eat the seed.
9. Slowly raise the amount of seeds you can hold in your spare cheek to reduce the number of reloads per serving.
Even Tips are offerred.
1. To avoid annoying your coworkers, try to crack the seeds with your mouth closed to minimize the irritating "cracking" sound.
2. If you are a really serious seeder, try growing sunflowers and harvesting your own seeds. You can then decide how much salt you want.
3. Don't be discouraged if you don't get it the first time. Professional Sunflower Seed eaters have had years of practice and make it look easy. Keep at it, practice makes perfect.
4.If you want to shoot some seeds inside spit them into a cup.
Above instruction is totally different from how we, Chinese, eat sunflower seeds. If you watch the Youtube video, the boy on the left is how we 'naturally' eat sunflower seeds (I don't recall being taught so, guess it is inherently in the gene?)
