First of all, little kids are immensely better at learning any kind of language than adults are. See Chomsky's "critical age" hypothesis. Secondly, if they must learn fingerspelling, then why not every other language out there? To make it fair, in my area they would have to know 26 words in Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Armenian, Korean, Tagalog...and that's just off the top of my head.
I'm sorry, I of course agree that it would be wonderful if more people knew some amount of sign, but making it a requirement for waitstaff is unrealistic.
Heh, my technique when eating with signers is to take BIG bites since I never know when the next opportunity will come for me to pick up my fork. And then of course signing with your mouth full isn't too much of an issue (unless you laugh).
