你的饮食习惯暴露了你的性格

The way you make your way around your dinner plate — meaning the steps that you take in actually eating that meal — may reveal gobs about you and your personality. Even more, for example, than that you're a pig or terrified of gluten or have an unnatural attraction to all things deep fried.

你在就餐时的选择，或者你在吃饭时独有的一些行为，都揭示了你的性格特征。打个比方，假如你是个胖子，你就有可能很不喜欢含麸质的食物，而对油炸食品情有独钟。

Or maybe not. It's a tricky subject.

当然，事实也可能并非如此。这有点棘手。

Take this type of eater: The guy (or woman) who spears a forkful of potatoes and finishes them off. Then moves on to the broccoli. And finishes that off. And then slides over to the chicken fried steak (or maybe it's filet mignon) to polish off the meal.

不妨看看这个例子：一个男人(女人)拿起叉子，先叉起了马铃薯;慢慢地细嚼慢咽完马铃薯后，又转向了西兰花;西兰花解决掉了之后，这才开始吃煎牛排。这就是他们吃饭的顺序，这就是他们进餐的方式。

They're out there, these compartmentalized chow-downers, these isolationist eaters​, these ... whatever you want to call them. They exist. That's not debated. You may have even shared a lunch with one and not even noticed.

他们或叫做孤独的食客，或叫做孤独主义者……等等，无论你怎么称呼他们都行。毋庸置疑，这些人的确存在于我们的周围。我们甚至和他们一起吃过饭，却并没有意识到他们的存在。

What are we to make of those people?

我们该如何看待这些人呢?

"There's no real name for it. It's just conveying a personality type," says Juliet A. Boghossian, a self-described behavioral food expert and the founder of the site Food-Ology. "They're very ... I hate the word 'obsessive,' but I'm going to use it. They can be obsessive with their detail. Meticulous with the details. Order. Structure. They need the order and structure. And part of it, it's often because they're trying to protect the integrity of a given situation."

Juliet a. Boghossian是网站Food-Ology的创始人，也是行为食品专家，她说：“其实这并没有什么明确的定义，只是暗示了某一种性格特征。他们……怎么说呢，算是强迫症吧。其实我很不喜欢用这个词，但事实就是如此。他们对细节非常在意，说是细致入微也不为过。吃的顺序、怎么吃，他们都非常看重。这样做的原因之一，可能是为了保持某个特定场合下的完整性。”

Boghossian likens isolationist eaters to another well-known kind of quirky eater, the one who insists that no food item on the plate touches another. Everything separate. Every portion to its own plot of plate real estate.

她将这类人与另一种食客联系在了一起，即吃东西时要把盘子里的所有食物都分开的人。那简直是每种食物都必须呆在某块小地盘里，相互不得越界。

The difference in those two eaters is that the one type — the one with the phobia over food touching — is fairly well known in science. Others, like the isolationist eaters, are not so well defined or studied, making it more difficult to come to conclusions or even make assumptions.

这两种食客的区别在于，后者已为科学界所知，但是前者(孤立主义者)仍然是个未知数。关于他们并没有明确的定义，也没做过大量的研究，所以在对他们的行为做出假设时，也异常困难。

"I think it really depends on the behavior," says Nancy Zucker, a professor in the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. "I think there's a lot of eating behaviors that we don't quite understand. Why an individual would complete one thing on their plate and switch to the next thing: I don't think that we understand the things that contribute to that. You can have all kinds of hypotheses, like people who have trouble with kind of executive functioning, switching back and forth in general. You can look at that. But we don't really know."

杜克大脑科学研究所(Duke Institute for Brain Sciences)认知神经科学研究中心(Center for Brain Sciences)教授南希·祖克(Nancy Zucker)表示:“我认为这与性格密切相关。但这些行为中有太多我们无法理解的点了。为什么一个人非得吃完这个之后再吃下一个?我想这其中的原因我们并不太了解。你可以做各种各样的假设，比如你会觉得这个人不太能做到这个舀一勺，那个叉一口。但这仅仅是假设而已，并没有办法验证。”

Food-touching phobias, Zucker says, have been studied. "When people have trouble with things on their plate touching each other, for some individuals — not for all — there may be an exaggerated disgust response," she says from Chicago, where she was attending the International Conference on Eating Disorders. "Disgust is an emotion that is designed to protect us from pathogens." To a food-touching phobic, a brown spot on a french fry could ruin an entire plate of food if not carefully isolated.

Zucker说，此前已经有过关于“食物接触恐惧症”的研究。她在芝加哥参加国际饮食障碍大会(International Conference on Eating Disorders)时说:"他们会想尽办法要把盘中的食物分的很开，对其中的某部分来说，这可能是一种夸大的厌恶反应。厌恶是一种保护我们免受病原体伤害的情绪。对于他们来说，只要没把食物都分开，哪怕时薯条上一块小小的褐色斑点，都可能会毁掉这次用餐体验。

That brand of picky eating might seem a little over-the-top to many.

大部分人可能会觉得，这未免也些太挑剔了。

"But that's a good thing to some people to have that level of structure and order," Boghossian says. "At the same time it could be viewed as a bit rigid, [but] it's harder for [these eaters] to adapt to sudden change, [like] having everything thrown on the plate."

但Boghossian说，这对那些性格如此的人来说，是件好事儿。虽然我们觉得这样很死板，但对他们来说，他们已经习惯了，也很难再接受新的变化。如果不分开，他们就会觉得好像是把所有的食物统统都随意堆在了盘中。

Uncovering Eating Clues

揭开背后的秘密

How we eat, if we've been doing it for very long, is something that becomes routine. Habits are formed in the brain, Zucker says. If we're used to eating past the point of when we're full, for example, we'll regularly do that, which can result in real health problems.

.Zucker说，如果我们经常这么做，久而久之就会养成了这样的进食习惯。例如，如果我们经常在吃饱之后还不停嘴，身体就会不适，还可能会出现各种各样的问题。

Likewise, if we're used to picking around a plate in a certain manner, we'll often continue to do it.

同样地，如果我们经常把食物分开，这个“毛病”也就很难戒掉了。

Why? What do those different eating habits mean? What do they tell us about ... us? "There's so much about the microcosm and the micro-behavior that constitutes an eating episode that we really don't understand," Zucker says.

那这到底是为什么呢?Zucker表示，这些微行为背后的原因尚不明朗。

Boghossian's site, Food-Ology, features the tagline, "You Are HOW You Eat." She has spent more than 25 years studying how people eat and uses her own observations, along with some data mined from marketing research firms, to come to her conclusions. She's done food behavior studies for companies like Baskin-Robbins and Dunkin' Donuts.

Food-Ology上有这样一句标语：You are HOW you eat。Boghossian花了超过25年的时间来研究人们的饮食习惯，并且基于自己的观察数据以及一些来自市场调查公司的数据得出了结论。她为像巴斯金罗宾斯和邓肯甜甜圈这样的公司做过食品行为研究。

"How you're eating reveals your behavior. It reveals your character," she says. "It's a wonderful way to truly reveal what a person's all about. What makes them tick. What motivates them. What challenges them. What they're fearful of. You can learn all of that by observing the way a person is with food."

"你的饮食方式暴露了你的行为，揭示了你的性格。这才是真正看透一个人的绝妙方式——是什么激励着他们，是什么在挑战他们，他们又害怕什么?通过观察一个人吃东西的样子，你或许就能更彻底地认识他。"