Huh. Really? I’m surprised at the amount of anti-chopstick sentiment in this thread. Being Singaporean, I use forks, knives, spoons, and yes, chopsticks, as appropriate.
You can’t eat sashimi with a fork. You can’t pick up crispy seaweed with a fork. You could stab tempura sweet potatoes with a fork, but taking bites out of the stabbed tempura on the fork would look really goofy. Soup noodles are far easier to eat with chopsticks. It’s far easier to pick floating vegetables and things out of soup than it is to try and stab it with a fork. I don’t even know how you would do shabu shabu with a fork.
Use the right implement for the right type of food, perhaps? For that matter, I don’t understand why you people eat rice off a plate with a fork, when a spoon is far more efficient.
My family (Midwestern white devils) keeps a bar glass filled with chopsticks on the counter, since we use them all the time. Generally when cooking Chinese or Japanese, but really just whenever they seem convenient- which is relatively often. It’s a practical way to et many kinds of foods, and it’s nice to change it up once in a while. As an example, just the other day I had some cucumber slices in a soy marinade, and I found that chopsticks were preferable to forks, as you could grab a ingle slice at a time and didn’t have to worry about the slice dropping off your fork.
A Japanese Canadian friend taught me to use chopsticks back when we were in high school. I am not particularly graceful with them but I get the job done. Now that I am living in Vancouver again I am practicing more. I do it because it is appropriate and fun, and when I have learned a skill, I try to practice it.
chop-sticks are fun I learned to use them as a kid as my dad had been working in Indonesia and brought back a taste for asian kitchen and real nice sets of chopsticks
As mentioned above, I often find it easier for asian food to eat with chopsticks, too
I’ve messed with chopsticks, just for the heck of it, but my thinking is the staff of the restaurant is pretty much interested in making money, and if that means the patrons use a fork, so be it. And if they’re such purists that stainless steel utensils offend their sensibilities, maybe they need to find another line of work.
A fork has *different *utility. Do you eat your soup with one because you find spoons to be primitive? Do you use a food processor to chop a single onion because your knife is insufficiently sophisticated in its manufacture?
And I don’t see how you get to whine about anyone else being snotty. At least he wasn’t being snotty *and *ridiculous.
I get what you mean. I find the idea that chopsticks are more effective for eating anything somewhat strange. Personally I think forks are objectively better, but there’s no way to really be sure.
As for the actual point of the thread, I know someone with a similar attitude. I find chopsticks fun and I normally use them in Chinese restaurants, but they’re not more appropriate. People like that are annoying.
We all use chopsticks in our house. I use them because they’re fun and appropriate. I learned how from a book in my library, and practiced on easy things like pound cake cut into cubes. An Asian customer that we took out to a restaurant expressed surprise that I was using chopsticks to eat, so I immediately plunged them into my water and brought out an ice cube.
Pepper Mill learned how to use them because the guy she was dating promised to take her to a nice Chinatown (NYC) restaurant if she learned. She did, but he didn’t keep his part of the bargain (I got to do that). She’s eaten at asian restaurants with them ever since.
We brought up MilliCal to use them. she doesn’t invariably do so when she eats Asian food, but usually does. All three of us did this past weekend at a Japanese/Korean restaurant in the wilds of Vermont.
When we have visitors, we offer them the option of with or without. Most people do use them. I tyhink it’s the novelty. I know that we’ve introduced several of our daughter’s friends to the use of them.
I am Indian and an excellent chopstick user - my SO’s dad even complimented me once, and he doesn’t give out compliments easily. I even eat the rice with chopsticks. I don’t really think forks are better and that’s rather…ethnocentric to say so. Maybe they’re better for you. I’ll grant that. But I have fairly good manual dexterity (with my right hand anyway).
So yes, I use them exclusively and I roll my eyes when I am in an Asian restaurant and I have to ask for chopsticks because they have automatically brought me a fork.
Brilliant! Once you know how to use them, it’s like eating with your fingers, only more civilized. I generally like a fork for shoveling food into my mouth but most Asian food I get is cut to be eaten with chopsticks. Now I’m adding Cheetos to the list. They are probably made in China anyway.
Mm, yes, I eat these dried and flavored string beans - they are absolutely yummy - but it’s the same situation. The chopsticks keep your fingers clean.
With many Eastern Asian-style dishes, it’s easier to use chopsticks, just as with many South Asian-style dishes, it’s easier to use your hands. That is, the cuisine is designed with the utensil in mind.
That would be an enormously inaccurate and also enormously obnoxious thing to say.
As stated above, there’s nothing “higher” or “better” about a fork with respect to chopsticks. They both work quite well for the purposes for which they were designed. I wouldn’t try to eat lasagna with chopsticks; I wouldn’t try to eat soup with a fork; I wouldn’t try to eat sliced, marinated jellyfish with a spoon.
I learned to eat with chopsticks when I was very young, and we never went to any restaurants other than Chinese restaurants unless we were on vacation. My father had several Chinese friends, and one of them owned a restaurant which was our special-occasion place; other times, we would go to a place closer to home. We always used chopsticks.
The ones provided in many restaurants are so cheap I’m afraid of getting splinters, but if you roll them awhile you’re OK. I don’t want to be the only one at the table using them, so I usually use a fork nowadays. But I’m extremely proficient.
I think my father learned when he was in the South Pacific in WWII.
