Edith Wharton’s Moroccan Clichés
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
There was also literally a black-face scene further in the movie, which even for the late 1950s it was a strange thing to film.
But most of the time you don't use your bare fingers directly, you use bread to grab the food. You do something similar to this video [1].
For other dishes (Pastilla, couscous) you use your bare fingers. For couscous, the technique is a little bit difficult, you have to form a ball in your hand [2].
1: starts at 6:55 https://youtu.be/mH4wki8z5oI?t=410
Cutlery is clearly the superior way to eat many types of food. But cutlery, reusable or not, costs money.
When I travelled in eastern Europe it was common to have only spoons (for soups) and rice dishes. Meat was always eaten by hand.
Soups served with entire boiled chicken legs were common (although usually the meat was often a luxury and only bought/killed that day to respect my visit to their home).
The legs were expected to be eaten by hand and cleaned to the bone (cartilage and all). Chicken stomachs were my most hated and most commonly eaten...
In the poorest places home made bread was used in lieu of cutlery so much so that I began to make gifts of cutlery to the poorest homes I was invited to all of which they use to this day (of course the new children miss out and must eat in the old we way).
Sorry for the disjointed nature of this post I find it hard to write on a phone.
Second, even if that was the case, I can assure you it's not unlikely for foreigners in Mexico to visit tourist-oriented places where you'll find locals wearing a sombrero. The fact that they're pandering to customers and this is part of a movie scene, doesn't mean the movie is the latin american equivalent of orientalist. The same goes for fes hats in Morocco. If anything, the scene exposes the orientalist nature of some of its characters who're ignorant and exaggerate the cultural differences, while others see the differences as quite ordinary and aren't fazed by them.