【正文】 equent. Since people are inclined to interpret the unfamiliar things or phenomena in terms of their own world outlooks and cultures, more and more problems and misunderstandings arise inevitably, not only in the aspect of food and food habits, but in many other aspects. Clearly, something is needed more than the contact itself if people who do not share culture want to understand one another. Crosscultural awareness is just one of them. The goal of crosscultural munication, according to Professor Hu Wenzhong, “is to help increase people’s crosscultural awareness so that fewer problems arise in their interaction with people of another culture. To do this， it is necessary to pare cultures to establish similarities and identify differences”.5 Many other scholars also hold the same idea that a successful crosscultural understanding is based on recognizing the way in which they resemble one another as well as the way in which they differ. Totally this paper consists of five chapters. Chapter One introduces research objectives, significance of the research, method and overall anization． Chapter Two classifies the notion of culture, and explains some related terms. Chapter Three discusses the differences on concepts in Chinese and Western table manners while Chapter Four focus on the differences on etiquette in Chinese and Western table manners respectively. The last chapter is the summary for the whole parison. Ⅱ.Notion of culture Before making parison between Chinese and Western table manners, it is necessary for us to confine the current research to certain aspects to avoid confusion. In this chapter some notions and terms related to the research will be discussed, such as culture, table manners, intercultural munication, and crosscultural munication and so on. A. The Definition of Culture What is culture, and how to define it? As a matter of fact, many scholars have offered many definitions, ranging from broader ones to narrower ones. Sapir says, “Culture may be defined as what a society does and thinks”.6 Benedict says in her book Patterns of Culture, “What really binds men together is their culture the ideas and the standards they have in mon”.7 Bate and Plog propose a descriptive definition that includes most of the major territory of culture on which scholars currently agree: Culture is a system of shared benefits , values , customs , behaviors ， and artifacts that the members of a society use to cope with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through Based on the definitions mentioned above, Samovar, leading figure in crosscultural munication, proposes his own definition that is perhaps more suited to the munication between cultures: We define culture as the deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, actions, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe and artifacts acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group These and other definitions all point to one fact that culture is abundant, including everything from the style of the writing to minds and thoughts. Edward. T. Hall, one of the most famous anthropologists and founders of crossculture munication, once described the omnipresent and manding power of culture, “There is not one aspect of human life that is not touched and altered by culture ”.10 In many ways，Hall is correct: Culture is everything and exits in everywhere. Therefore, to some extent, culture is both our teacher and textbook, acting as the guidance to almost every aspect of our lives. Without culture, it is hard to imagine what we human beings will be and how our society will bee. B. The Definition of Food Culture When we study a culture for municating purposes, we should focus on the dominant cultural pattern and guard against getting sidetracked. When we pare cultural differences, we should concentrate on the major differences of two dominant patterns. For instance, when we say differences between Chinese and American cultures, we mean differences between the dominant Han culture and the dominant American Actually, till now nobody has ever made a widely recognized definition because of various reasons. In order to make the parison more concrete and practical, I confine table manners to the aspects of food habits, food etiquette, the attitudes towards food, the function of food, etc. that are derived from each individual culture. 1. Chinese Food Culture Chinese food culture in this research mainly refers to the one in the Han nationality. As we all know, China is a nation with 56 ethnic groups, each of which has its unique food, food habits, etc. But the Han nationality and its culture are the mainstream in China due to some historical, political and economic reasons. Therefore, this paper mainly talks about the mon table manners of the Han nationality. 2. Western Food Culture Western table manners in this research is mainly concerned with the one in the Englishspeaking countries , especially in America and Britain, because their cultural patterns and influence have bee dominant in the West， which is generally recognized by the international munity. On the other hand, most of the materials and information on table manners collected by the author are all about American or British people’s food, food habits, etc. C． Notion of Some Terms Intercultural munication, generally speaking, “occurs when a member of one culture produces a message for consumption by a member of another culture.”12. Frequently, the term crossculture munication is used when referring to the munication between people from different cultures, since this term implies a parison between c