AFAIK, it’s normally considered acceptable to pick up almost any meat served on the bone - with the possible exception of large things with smallish bones (like T Bone steak perhaps) - if the establishment is sufficiently posh to frown on this, they just won’t serve it to you that way.
How about a traditional breakfast fry up - bacon, hash browns, sausage, tomato and mushrooms? Would you eat the bacon first - maybe get some tomato on the fork as well, then eat the hash brown separately, then perhaps the sausage with a bit of mushroom, etc
If you load several pieces of food on the fork at a time, you get a richer and greater variety of flavours due to the range of permutations available. I would probably load 3-4 small pieces on my fork at a time. Of course if you have mash on the fork you can always invert and stick on some peas.
In the US, generally your bacon has nothing to do with your fork, so that’s out of the equation.
Like Zoe said, in the American style one generally doesn’t load up the fork, but I think it’s more along the lines of not overloading it. You would certainly see people eating American style who would get a forkful of sausage with a bit of mushroom on it. What would be less conventional would be loading up as if you’re trying to make a shiskabab, with hash brown, sausage, mushroom, tomato, everything on your plate, all skewered on your fork together. Okay, I’m making this sound like a big deal, but honestly, in real life we manage to eat without thinking too hard on it. Breakfast foods tend to get mixed more, I’ve observed.
(I’d like to note that I don’t care how anyone eats, American or otherwise – I’m only trying to describe the traditional way American table manners would be taught in a formal setting, like in a business etiquette class.)
Well, I’ll give my input. I grew up in the South, so I was obvioiusly a swicher by birth. I never really thought much about it, really. I can’t remember when I moved to the European Style, as I did it as a young kid. And well, you know, kids learn everything faster. I got it from my Dad, who got it from a colleague of his from Central America. He noticed how much more efficient, and if someone were to disparage you, you just say you’re eating, “continental style” which is a snooty way of defending yourself.
But we only did it for eating meat. When it comes time to scoop peas, etc, you have to switch back to putting the fork in your right hand!
Now, the Danes and the Germans are the biggest two-handed eaters I know. If they have a only peas left they’ll use the knife to push the peas onto the fork. The knife is also used to spread sauce onto meat, etc. The knife is used like you’d use a finger if it were socially ok.
Well now I am still learning to do the two-handed thing all the time. It’s not easy. Scooping up peas with your fork in your left hand is hard, but it is nice to have the ability to use the other thing as a way to keep them from sliding around the plate.
Wait, what? You don’t pick it up in your hands, surely?
I have a trip to the US coming up in a few months. I’m starting to fear that I’m going to look like a total freak. 
I believe so - bacon in the US is, I believe, often cooked to a completely brittle and crispy consistency, so any attempt to spear it with the fork will just result in shattered bacon shrapnel shooting off in several directions.
Yes, generally. Works really well, too. It’s easy if you grow up doing it that way, like so many things. Also, sometimes the plate is advantageously-shaped, so sometimes there’s a bit of an incline toward the edges that helps loose food get on a fork.
Depends on how much food is left. The last half-dozen peas commonly go uneaten. There are alternatives, of course.
If the lip of the plate is no help, you can use bread or a roll or similar to trap food for the fork. Another way is to use the knife in the left hand to trap food for the fork – same as the European style, just with opposite hands!
ISTM that folks all over are using both hands to eat things like steak … just using them differently. In my experience, eating steaks the whole way through with fork-left/knife-right is not the least bit unusual in the U.S. What would be unusual in the U.S. is not to put the fork back in the right hand once the steak is done. Europeans and Australians seem to use the right hand for single-utensil dishes, and that leads me to believe that the differences between eating styles is being hugely exaggerated.
Correct. Bacon is finger food.
Reminds of a little poem my (English) mother used to say when we were kids:
I eat my peas with honey
I’ve done it all my life
It makes the peas taste funny
But it keeps them on the knife.
After i moved to America, i didn’t initially notice anyone doing the switching thing. But then one night i noticed my girlfriend (now wife) doing it, and i said, “What the hell are you doing?” She explained the whole switching thing to me, and America had never seemed more strange. She was born and raised in San Francisco.
You can try asking them to not cook it crisp. I can’t stand hard crunchy bacon and won’t even attempt to eat it but yes, if some fool cooks it to that state, it’s pretty much impossible to use a fork on it, unless you try trapping a shard between the tines.
I’ve only had it that way myself a couple of times (on the QEII) and being a Brit, I tried to eat it with knife and fork; some of it stayed on the plate and I broke it up into little pieces (with the knife and fork) and mixed it with other things (scrambled eggs or cooked tomatoes) to pick it up.
It was OK, but I can’t help perceiving it as ‘burnt’ that way. YMMV
What’s the verdict on sticking the bacon on your bread and eating it as an open-face sandwich instead? Is that acceptable as a substitute for eating it with your fingers?
I seem to recall hearing - or maybe reading on here - that bacon often comes with maple syrup in the US. Eating that without cutlery must make a hell of a mess.
Of course you do.
We also cook bacon here. Completely. Until it’s no longer raw. I’m not sure if Australia is the same - but after a trip to NZ, I was shocked that the whole country wasn’t on the verge of death or illness from trichinosis)
But yes, after the bacon is eaten by hand, if you wanted both hashbrowns & sausage at the same time, you’d take a small amount of both and use the fork to carry them to your mouth (tines up) no mushing involved.
I’m not sure what tomatoes are doing on the plate at all at breakfast.
But there’s a difference between ‘cooked’ and ‘charred into brittleness’. Bacon’s not that thick; it cooks pretty quick. I don’t like it raw either, but I’m pretty sure that no meat product should break into shards. 
ETA: It’s actually Washington that I’m visiting, so the heads-up on the bacon situation has been helpful, Amarinth. 
It’s more the case that bacon is often a side dish with things that come with maple syrup, like pancakes, waffles, or french toast. If your bacon gets in your syrup, then you just have to cope with your fork.
I don’t think the open-faced sandwich would fly in anything but a casual setting. Of course we have regular bacon sandwitches.
This whole discussion leads to only one logical conclusion: So long as all your food is ending up inside your mouth and not somewhere else, there is no “proper way to eat.” Left hand, right hand, spoon, fingers – who the fork cares? And all your mothers were narrow-minded little dictators for insisting that there was. And if observing that someone has a different technique leads one make judgments of his or hercharacter, such as “voracious” or “fussy,” then that’s just foolish. So there.
It’s crispy. I think it might be helpful to think of it as an entirely different food so that you’re not expecting it to be any particular way, and see if you like it. (I even like mine extra crispy!)
Hope you have a good visit in Washington!
There are lots of odd etiquette things that people don’t really observe anymore. Isn’t there something about moving your soup spoon away from you when you scoop up the soup, for example? It always seemed to me that these rules all shared the same basic premise: You are to avoid looking as though you are in a rush to eat and/or lazy. So a person with bad manners would move his head towards the food and shovel it in, rather than moving the food towards his mouth. The rules all seem geared towards that idea. To me, it does look somewhat less “refined” to see someone holding utensils in both hands simultaneously. It sort of gives the impression that the person is shoveling in food with both hands at the same time, even though that’s not actually what they’re doing. (Think Homer Simpson snatching food from all directions and shoving it into his mouth). A non-switcher would be viewed as being too impatient to set his knife down before getting the meat into his mouth. I think that’s the idea behind the “switching hands” thing. It shows that you aren’t in a hurry to eat your food. Of course I don’t care about such things, but that’s my impression of why we switch hands. What does surprise me is that Europeans don’t switch hands. You’d think that Americans would be more inclined to do it the fast & easy way, not the other way around. For example, when I watch and English movie or TV show, they bring tea out on a fancy tray and daintily pour it into cups with saucers under them, whereas Americans go to the kitchen counter and pour a cup of coffee straight out of the coffeemaker.
That may be post facto rationalisation for the practice, but as another poster has pointed out, the real reason is because the American system was originally developed when the only utensils used were a spoon and a knife. When the fork was adopted from Europe, it was stuck in the place of the spoon (holding with the left while cutting with the knife and then scooping with the right). The European method was developed with the fork itself.
The soup spoon thing has the practical application of allowing any drips to fall back into the bowl as you raise the spoon, rather than into your lap.