In 1996 Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008), then professor of government at Harvard University, published The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, a New York Times bestseller that year. Huntington argued that three major civilizations had been formed in the world: the Western Judeo-Christian civilization, the East Asian Confucian civilization and the Middle Eastern Islamic civilization. Interestingly, if this tripartite partition could indeed map out the world, then these civilizations are distinguished from one another not only in terms of religious traditions, cultural ideals and political institutions (factors Huntington considers most seriously) but they also differ in culinary practices and dining customs, which are little noted in Huntington’s book. As mentioned in the Introduction, from the 1970s, food historians in Japan, such as Isshiki Hachirō, and American historian Lynn White in the 1980s had already observed that three dining customs, or food cultural spheres, existed in the world: (1) eating with hand(s); (2) eating with forks, knives and spoons; and (3) eating with chopsticks. Isshiki detailed that the first sphere, constituting about forty percent of the world’s population, consists of peoples living in South and Southeast Asia, the Middle and Near East, and Africa. The second sphere, about thirty percent of the population, is composed of the peoples of Europe and North and South America. And the third, or the chopsticks cultural sphere, constituting another thirty percent of the world population, includes the Chinese, the Japanese, Koreans and the Vietnamese. These marked differences in dining customs, Isshiki further explained, reflect and extend the differences in food intake (e.g. whether one eats meat or not and whether the grain staple is a plant or a root tuber), food preparation, and eating etiquette and table manners. Geographically and demographically speaking, Isshiki’s, White’s and Huntington’s divisions of the world are identical.