Dishes puzzle

I began my problem by writing out the constraints I had to work with:

- 2 people shared 1 dish of rice,

- 3 people shared 1 dish of broth,

- 4 people shared 1 dish of meat

I then noticed that in order to find out the number of people, I could see this relation:

1 dish/2 people + 1 dish/3 people + 1 dish/4 people = 6 dishes + 4 dishes + 3 dishes/ 12 people 

(by finding the LCM)

which would lead me to an answer of 13 dishes/12 people.

Since we know that there are 65 dishes, 

we can see that if we divide the number of dishes by the 13 dishes/12 people relation, we can cancel the "dishes" and get a result containing only the number of people.

Doing this,

65 dishes ÷ 13 dishes/12 people =  5 65 dishes x 12 people/13 dishes = 60 people

Therefore, without using algebra, you can see that there are a total of 60 guests.

I don't think cultural context has any effect at all because the problem would be just as doable for any student if there was no underlying cultural context. I think it is a good problem to have, but I do not think there is any strong, underlying cultural effect left.