Consider the Fork

by Bee Wilson

  The system of eating with chopsticks eliminates the main Western taboos at table, which chiefly have to do with managing the violence of the knife. The French theorist Roland Barthes, who saw symbols everywhere but especially at the table, argued that chopsticks were the polar opposite of the knife. Holding a knife makes us treat our food as prey, thought Barthes: we sit at dinner ready “to cut, to pierce, to mutilate.” Chopsticks, by contrast, had something “maternal” about them. In expert hands, these sticks handle food gently, like a child:

  The instrument never pierces, cuts or slits, never wounds but only selects, turns, shifts. For the chopsticks . . . never violate the foodstuff: either they gradually unravel it (in the case of vegetables) or else prod it into separate pieces (in the case of fish, eels), thereby rediscovering the natural fissures of the substance (in this, much closer to the primitive finger than to the knife).

  Despite their basic gentleness, however, it is still possible to cause offense when eating with chopsticks. Superficially, Chinese table manners are more relaxed than traditional European and American ones: the table setting consists of nothing but a single pair of chopsticks and a three-piece porcelain set consisting of a spoon, a bowl, and a small plate. When Florence Codrington, a British woman in China in the early twentieth century, invited a Chinese “old lady friend” to her house to eat dinner English style, she “ran round and round the table in wild excitement, touching everything in turn and then held her sides laughing. ‘Ai-a! it is laughable, it is surprising!’ she gasped, ‘all these tools to eat a meal with!!’” Unlike the traditional Western procession of individual courses, Chinese dishes are set on the table to share communally, with everyone picking at the same time. It is not rude to reach across others for a far-off dish. Chinese food writer Yan-Kit So observed that the “likelihood of chopsticks clashing is minimal.”

  On the other hand, because Chinese cuisine is part of a culture of frugality, there are strict rules about eating food in such a way that neither waste nor the appearance of waste is allowed, particularly when it comes to rice. The way in which everyone shares dishes may seem random, but a mark of good manners is that no one present should be able to tell what your favorite dish is; in other words, you should not dig your chopsticks greedily into the same dish too often. As for rice eating, the bowl should be raised to the lips with the left hand, while the chopsticks shovel the rice in. Every last grain of rice must be eaten. British children who leave food on their plates are warned to think of the starving in Africa. Chinese children—who eat several small helpings from a bowl instead of a single heaping plateful—are given a different, more persuasive, admonition against wastefulness: to think of the sweat on the brow of the farmer who grew their rice.

  The Japanese came to chopstick culture later than the Chinese (from whom they borrowed the idea), but you would not know it now, from the way that chopsticks shape the entire culinary universe of the country It was only around the eighth century AD that chopsticks supplanted hands among the common people, but having done so, they rapidly became essential to the Japanese way of eating. Japanese chopsticks tend to be shorter than Chinese ones (around 22 cm as against 26 cm), and they have pointed ends rather than flat ones, allowing for the most minute specks of food to be picked up. If a food can neither be eaten with chopsticks nor drunk from a bowl, it used to be said, then it is not Japanese. As Japanese food has become globalized in recent decades, this rule no longer holds, entirely. Among the young of Tokyo and Osaka, two of the most popular dishes are breaded pork katsu cutlet—which is usually sliced on the diagonal in slices that require further cutting with a knife—and “curry,” a strange all-purpose spicy sauce, gloppy and redolent of canteen food, which many in Japan adore. This curry cannot be eaten with chopsticks and is too thick to drink from a bowl: it calls for a spoon. Another popular Japanese food is the white bread “sando,” imitations of the British sandwich, made from sliced white bread stuffed with mayo-heavy fillings. It is held, as every true sandwich must be, in the hand.

  Nevertheless, what is eaten and how it is eaten in Japan are still largely shaped by chopsticks, and there are a series of very specific forms of behavior that must be avoided when holding them. In addition to the obvious taboos against using chopsticks in such a way as to suggest violence—pointing them in someone’s face, sticking them upright in a plate of food—there are more subtle transgressions. These include:

  Namida-bashi (crying chopsticks): letting a liquid drip like tears from the end

  Mayoi-bashi (hesitating chopsticks): allowing your chopsticks to hover over various dishes of food without choosing between them

  Yoko-bashi (scooping chopsticks): using chopsticks like a spoon

  Sashi-bashi (piercing chopsticks): using chopsticks like a knife

  Neburi-bashi (licked chopsticks): licking off fragments from the end of the chopsticks

  There are also taboos about the sharing of chopsticks. The Shinto religion has a horror of impurity or defilement of any kind. There is a belief that something that has been in someone else’s mouth picks up not merely germs, which would be killed by washing, but aspects of their personality, which would not. To use a stranger’s chopsticks is therefore spiritually disgusting, even when they have been washed. Professor Naomichi Ishige is an anthropologist of Japanese food who has published over eighty books. He once conducted an experiment on some of his Japanese seminar students, asking them: “Suppose you lend an article that you use to someone else, who uses it, and then thoroughly cleans it before returning it to you. Which article would you have the strongest sense of psychological resistance against reusing afterward?” The two objects that most often cited were a pair of undergarments “for the lower part of the body” and a pair of chopsticks.

  This goes some way toward explaining the phenomenon of waribashi, disposable chopsticks made from a small piece of cheap wood almost split in half, ready for the customer to pull apart and use. It is sometimes assumed that these waribashi are a modern Western influx, akin to polystyrene cups. But this is not so: they have been used ever since the beginnings of the Japanese restaurant industry in the eighteenth century, because giving a fresh pair of chopsticks to all customers was the only way a restaurateur could assure his clientele that what they put in their mouth was not defiled. They are a good example of how what we are prepared to accept in the way of the technology of eating is often determined more by cultural forces than function. Richard Hosking, a British expert on Japanese food, argues that “from the point of view of a foreigner not entirely at ease with chopsticks, waribashi are wretched,” because their shortness makes them tricky for large-handed people. They also have an annoying tendency to splinter apart the wrong way, forcing you to undergo the embarrassment of asking for another pair. Worse than that, waribashi are an ecological disaster. Japan now uses and throws away around 23 billion pairs per year.

  The appetite for disposable chopsticks, moreover, has spread to China, which now manufactures 63 billion pairs annually. By 2011, the Chinese demand for disposable wooden chopsticks was so great that it could no longer supply enough of the right kind of wood for its 1.3 billion citizens. An American manufacturing plant in Georgia has started to plug the gap. The state of Georgia is rich in poplar and sweet gum trees, whose wood is pliable and light enough to need no bleaching before it is made into chopsticks. The company, Georgia Chopsticks, now exports billions of disposable chopsticks to supermarket chains in China, Japan, and Korea, all with a label stating “Made in U.S.A.”

  Those first American traders who arrived in China in the nineteenth century and struggled with chopsticks like “monkies with knitting needles” probably never thought the day would come when the United States would be supplying chopsticks to China. In the end, however, the two cultures—the knife-and-spoon culture and the chopstick culture—have more in common than appears at first. When dining with one another, each of them may have secretly thought: You barbarians! But both cultures are united in their disdain for
a third group, those who manage the business of eating without any tools at all.

  Prejudices are by definition not reasonable, so perhaps we should not be surprised that most of the prejudices against eating with fingers turn out to have little basis in fact, when examined closely. First, there is the notion that touching food is a sign of slovenliness; second, that eating with fingers demonstrates a lack of manners; and third, that having no eating utensils limits what can be eaten. The answer to these concerns are: (1) No, (2) No, and (3) Only sometimes.

  Lack of cutlery does not signal lack of manners. Among people who consistently eat with fingers, performing elaborate ablutions becomes part of the rhythm of the meal. Even King Henry VIII, whose eating with fingers has become a byword for gross table manners, was actually far more attentive to both hygiene and etiquette than most sandwich eaters today. The king’s carver cleared away any crumbs using a voiding knife. Ushers provided him with napkins and swept specks of food off his clothing. At the end of the meal, a nobleman knelt before him with a basin, so that he could wash all traces of food off his hands. We may joke about Henry’s revolting manners, but how many of us stay half as clean during mealtimes?

  A cultural preference for eating with fingers tends to make diners very sensitive to cleanliness. Ancient Romans washed themselves from top to toe before dinner. Arabs in the desert rub their hands with sand. Many Arabs today use a fork and spoon, but before a traditional Middle Eastern meal, writes Claudia Roden, guests are entertained on sofas, where their hands are cleaned:

  A maid comes round with a large copper basin and flask, pouring out water (sometimes lightly perfumed with rose or orange blossom) for the guests to wash their hands. A towel is passed round at the same time.

  In the ninth century, among Arabs, if a single guest so much as scratched his head after washing, everyone at the table would have to wait for him to wash all over again before they started to eat. The little finger bowls with which genteel Europeans cleanse their hands after eating something like shellfish seem filthy by traditional Indian standards: the Indian custom is that hands should not be dipped into a basin of water, where they are recontaminated with the dirt they give off, but should be showered with a stream of fresh water for each person.

  Those who dine with fingers are also very particular about which fingers they use. Not only is the left hand kept out of action (because it is used for toileting and therefore “unclean”), but there are strictures on which fingers of the right hand should be used. For true politeness, in most cultures where food is handheld, only the thumb, forefinger, and middle finger are used. (As with the various knife-and-fork rules, there are exceptions. Couscous, because it is so fragmented, may be eaten with all five fingers.) Food should not be grabbed precipitously from the common dish. It is also very rude to anticipate the next bite before you have finished the first, which is not the rule among knife-and-fork eaters.

  As for the question of whether finger-eating limits what can be eaten, the answer is that it does, but no more so than forks or chopsticks. The main limitation is temperature. Cultures that eat with fingers do not have the same fetish for piping hot food and hot plates that we do. “Are your plates hot, Hot, HOT?” asked society hostess Elsie de Wolfe in 1934, in a guide to “successful dining.” They’d better not be if you are eating with fingers. Room temperature, or a bit warmer, is the ideal for finger food. Fingers are also not the ideal tools for grappling with an English roast dinner: slabs of meat in gravy definitely call for cutlery.

  In the countries of finger-eating, the food has evolved to fit, and hands have developed powers that the presence of cutlery denies them. Ottaviano Bon, a European traveler at the court of the “Turkish emperor” in the early seventeenth century, noted that the meat of the emperor was “so tender, and so delicately dressed that . . . he needs no knife, but pulls the flesh from the bones very easily with his fingers.” Similarly, with a piece of Indian naan bread in one hand and a bowl of dal in the other, poised to dip and scoop, you do not feel the lack of a fork. Fingers are not just adequate substitutes for table utensils: they are better, in many respects. As Margaret Visser writes:

  To people who eat with their fingers, hands seem cleaner, warmer, more agile than cutlery. Hands are silent, sensitive to texture and temperature, and graceful—provided, of course, that they have been properly trained.

  In Arab countries where eating with fingers is still the norm, people become dexterously nimble at manipulating food from hand to mouth. Many of the things that happen at mealtimes would be impossible with a fork: scooping up a ball of rice, then stuffing it with a piece of lamb or eggplant before popping it neatly into the mouth. No cutlery could improve on such a perfect and satisfying gesture.

  The technology of tableware cannot be understood solely in terms of function. On pure utilitarian grounds, there is very little that you can do with the triumvirate of knife-fork-spoon or with chopsticks that you cannot do with fingers and a bowl (assuming that there is also some kind of cutting implement available). Table utensils are above all cultural objects, carrying with them a view of what food is and how we should conduct ourselves in relation to it. And then there are sporks.

  The term spork is first recorded in a dictionary in 1909, though the first patent for one was only issued in 1970. Both the word and the thing are a hybrid of spoon and fork. Like a pencil with an eraser on the end, the spork is what theorists of technology call a “joined” tool: two inventions combined. In its classical form—fashioned from flimsy disposable plastic and given away at fast-food outlets—the spork has the scooping bowl of a spoon coupled with the tines of a fork. It is not to be confused with a splayd, a knoon, a spife, or a knork.5

  Sporks have developed an affectionate following, of a somewhat ironic kind, in our lifetime. There are several websites devoted to them, proffering tips on use (“bend the prongs inward and outward and stand the spork on end. This is a leaning tower of spork”), haikus in their honor (“The spork, true beauty / the tines, the bowl, the long stem / life now is complete”), and general musings. Spork.org has this to say:

  A spork is a perfect metaphor for human existence. It tries to function as both spoon and fork, and because of this dual nature, it fails miserably at both. You cannot have soup with a spork; it is far too shallow. You cannot eat meat with a spork; the prongs are too small.

  A spork is not one thing or another, but in-between. In the Pixar-animated film Wall-E, a robot in a postapocalyptic wasteland attempts to clear up the detritus left behind on planet earth by the human race. He heroically sorts old plastic cutlery into different compartments, until encountering a spork. His little brain cannot cope with this new object. Does it go with the spoons? Or the forks? The spork is uncategorizable.

  Two years into his presidency, in 1995, Bill Clinton, pioneer of “Third Way” politics, made the spork the centerpiece of a humorous speech to the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, DC. He claimed that the spork was “the symbol of my administration. . . . No more false choice between the left utensil and the right utensil.” He ended the speech, to rapturous applause and laughter: ”This is a big, new idea—the spork!”

  Clinton was being funny, but the spork in its way really is a big new idea. Where did it come from? An urban myth circulates that sporks were first invented by General Douglas MacArthur as part of the US occupation of Japan in the 1940s. The story goes that MacArthur decreed that chopsticks were barbarian tools, whereas forks were too dangerous (the fear being that the conquered Japanese might rise up and use them as weapons). Therefore, the spork was forced on the Japanese as a safe, truncated version of Western tableware. This story cannot be right—as mentioned above, the name spork dates back to before 1909 and the form itself is still older: in nineteenth-century American silverware, both terrapin forks and ice-cream spoons were sporks in all but name (they were also known as “runcible spoons” after the Edward Lear poem). It is true that as far back as World War I, various armie
s used foldable spoon-fork combinations in the mess kit; but these were not true sporks but rather a spoon and a fork riveted together at the handle. These utensils are still used in the Finnish military: they are made from stainless steel and called Lusikkahaarukka, meaning spoon-fork.

  The urban myth about MacArthur and the Japanese possibly arose because the first person to create a hybrid fork-spoon for the mass market was another McArthur, an Australian named Bill McArthur, of Potts Point, New South Wales, who in 1943 launched his patented Splayd—derived from the verb to splay—after seeing a magazine photo of women awkwardly balancing knives, forks, and plates on their laps at a party. Boxes of stainless-steel Splayds—which described themselves as “all-in-one knife fork and spoon gracefully fashioned”—were marketed as the ideal solution to the newly popular Australian barbecue. They have since become an Aussie institution, having sold more than 5 million units.

  In the 1970s, Splayds were finally joined by Sporks. The name was trademarked in 1970 by a US company (the Van Brode Milling Company) and in 1975 by a UK one (Plastico Ltd.) as a combination plastic eating utensil. It wasn’t long before they became standard issue in fast-food restaurants. The spork made business sense: two plastic utensils for the price of one.

  Other important users of the spork included schools and prisons and any other institutional setting where the business of feeding is reduced to its most basic, functional level. American prison sporks are generally plastic, orange in color, and very ineffectual, because it is vital that they should not be used as weapons. In 2008, a man was arrested in Anchorage, Alaska, for attempting an armed robbery with a spork from a fried-chicken restaurant. The victim’s body was gashed with four “parallel scratches.” The most remarkable thing about this story is that anyone could have managed to do such damage with a spork, which in its fast-food incarnation is a pitiful implement, splintering into plastic shards on contact with any remotely challenging food.