my preference is chopsticks or whatever else is handy. there is a certain joy in being able to pick up the specific morsel that you want to eat with either hand 
everything else - chopsticks
slab of meat - fork and knife
soup - spoon
rice not in a bowl - spoon
chicken - fingers
watermelon - part of face and mouth
now my question regarding the fork and knife shuffle: are we talking about being unable to saw the meat or an unwillingness to do so because of awkwardness?
I don’t know about anyone else, but what I was talking about was the cutting of the food with the fork in the left hand and the knife in the right, putting down the knife, and then switching the fork to the right hand to spear the food and eat. It looks idiotic to me. I just keep the fork in my right hand and pick up the knife with my left when I need it. If I were left handed, I would just keep the fork in my left hand and pick up the knife with my right hand when needed.
looks silly to me too. why do people do that? etiquette?
This is just a comment, not a serious attempt to answer the OP, but I remember as a child reading a fable that said that chopsticks were invented because someone in the Chinese Imperial court (long, long ago) tried to use his fork and knife to assasinate the emperor at dinner, who then “outlawed” such sharp, dangerous utensils in favor of “harmless” wooden chopsticks.
Anyone else ever remember reading/being taught this fable? I can’t remember for sure, but I think it was included in a children’s book set that my parents got with their Collier’s Encyclopedias in 1963.
Here’s an old thread on the subject. Check out post #5.
It’s almost certainly not true. Chinese nobility used to eat with spoons, chopsticks being for the lower classes. This probably simply had to do with the fact that anyone can make chopsticks out of two sticks but spoons are more difficult/expensive to make. There’s also that chopsticks are believed to have first been used as a cooking utensil, only later being used for eating foods too hot to hold with your fingers.
Anyway, we’re talking Zhou dynasty here (until 200 BCE). I don’t know when they made their way into the courts.
do you mean this? that does not explain why the same hand can’t just scoop up the food, though the thread did say it was an american etiquette. thanks.
I can’t look up any more info in the book at the moment, as I’ve lent my copy to somebody. But my WAG would be: it’s more awkward to use a spoon to scoop up chunks of food on a plate than it is to use a fork, so if you’re right-handed, you’re more likely to use the knife in your right hand to cut several bites’ worth, then switch the spoon to your right hand to transfer the cut food to your mouth.
Of course, this doesn’t answer the question “Why don’t you just use the knife in your right hand to shove the food into the spoon in your left?”
This is absolutely correct. In Vietnam at least, chopsticks are nearly always accompanied by an Asian-style (fake) ivory flat-bottomed soup spoon, and are only used when eating out of a small bowl (which is supposed to be brought close to the mouth anyway). When eating from a plate, western-style stainless steel forks and spoons are used.
I’m equally at home with both, having lived in a Vietnamese household for years (white guy here), and you can talk about picking up single grains of rice, slippery noodles, or button mushrooms, but I’ve gotta say that the hardest skill I learned from my Asian family and friends, and the one that took me the longest to adopt, is the skill of not being uptight about eating utensils.
I’m not talking about forgetting basic table manners (for which there are some cultural differences of which it’s a good idea to know at least the basics), but more about the fact that most Chinese and Vietnamese I know will switch back and forth between eastern and western utensils without batting an eyelid - often several times within the course of a meal. The philosophy is if it works better, just shaddup and use it. It’s now been years since I’ve looked up nervously if I’ve dropped something on the table in a Chinese restaurant. Nobody cares, and everybody does it. Left or right-handed, who cares? And Asian food always arriving at the table in nice bite-sized pieces is a bit of a myth in many cases (it’s fun to watch the look of fear sweep across a chopstick newbie’s face when the waiter brings a whole lobster or mud crab to the table, or when he drops a huge drumstick in their bowl, and there’s not a knife to be seen :d ).
As China Guy said, last night I whipped up some fried bacon sandwiches on whiteboy processed bread (not very Asian), and used the chopsticks to cook the bacon. Absolutely perfect for frying many things as they give precise control to a far better degree than a spatula or tongs, and they don’t scratch the teflon.
Chopsticks are also great for when you’re assembling something and you drop a vital but tiny screw down into a gap which is too small for your fingers. My wife has a huge pair of cooking chopsticks (about 15" long) which are great for many non-cooking applications.
Well, I’m not sure which was “proper European manners” first, but I do know that when I was a boy my mother would sternly correct my poor table manners: no elbows on the table, no talking with your mouth full, keep napkin in lap, cough or sneeze away from the table, and only bring food to your mouth with your right hand. She was raised in a very prim and proper Southern aristocratic household in a small town on the Savannah river in Georgia.
So, I was taught to put down the knife, and use the fork in my right hand to bring cut food to my mouth. Presumably, these “proper” manners were brought over from England in the colonial days, and didn’t change much during the Plantation era.
However, when I grew up, went to college, and learned that the “proper European” way to eat steak is to use the left hand to bring a cut morsel to the mouth, and make sure the bottom of the fork points away from your face, well, I abandoned my “proper American” steak habits lickety-split.
But of course, when I also learned that the proper way to eat soup in Japan is to pick up the bowl with both hands and slurp it loudly, I promptly adopted that mannerism with much gusto as well. 
Forks didn’t come into general use until well after the English settlement of America. Indeed, for many years the church opposed the use of forks, asserting that god preferred people to use their god-given fingers. That’s the reason for the divergence between American and European use – they were introduced separately to the two continents and the etiquette developed independently.