Yes, like all good things, good manners and a kind heart are simply a means to crush the spirit and demean the artless. 
I haven’t read the book, is this something Vance is just concerned about and nothing comes of it? Or is there a villain in this story who notices Vance isn’t using the proper fork and uses that knowledge to belittle him? I’ve known people who moved from California to Arkansas who suffered culture shock so I can see how someone from Appalachia who is at Yale might suffer some anxiety as well. A formal dining experiencing may well be completely alien to Vance and make him uncomfortable even if everyone at the dinner is completely reasonable and polite.
When my sister became an officer in the US Navy, she was required to learn how to properly eat in a formal dining situation. I don’t know if it was a class, but at some point her and the other limited duty officers sat together and followed instructions for how to properly eat bread, where drinks should go, etc., etc. Maybe this was a relic from the past?
I don’t recall the scene from the book all that well - but I will say that although I have never encountered a place setting with more than two forks , there are people who will be confused by two forks - or even one. People know what they are used to - if you don’t have a formally set table at home and use a single fork for the entire meal and you go to the sort of restaurants that roll up your silverware in a paper napkin , you won’t necessarily know which fork is the salad fork or that your forks are to the left of your plate and the ones to the right of your spoons belong to your neighbor. *
*My sister did that to me once, I didn’t say anything but months later we were at another restaurant, and feeling vindicated she said - " See, the forks are on the right side of the plate" . She seemed kind of deflated when I told her the table was set incorrectly. Not sure why she didn’t know about table settings when we grew up in the same house- I can only assume because she was younger and certain holiday traditions must have changed when she was too young to remember.
I’ve always used what seemed “logical” in a given situation.
I’ve just found this chart:
One of the famous places this trope is used is in the 1990 movie Pretty Woman. Richard Gere’s character makes sure that Julia Roberts’ character knows about this before going to a fancy restaurant. He has Hector Elizondo’s character teach her about it:
Yeah, it’s a cliché. I suspect there’s a good reason why it seems so old-fashioned now. Until some point around the late 1960s or early 1970s, it was accepted that going out to a restaurant meant that you went to a place that matched your social class (or else you were certainly slumming it). Then there began to be reviews of restaurants in newspapers and magazines that were of interesting and little-known (to the well-off) ethnic restaurants. These were often run by ethnic groups that were seldom found among rich people. Going to a restaurant became about finding something different, not just about impressing people in your social class. This made worrying about which fork to use seem unimportant.
It made worrying about which fork to use seem unimportant to a certain group of people - which was typically not the group who grew up going to Red Lobster for special occasions. While going to restaurants may have been about “finding something different” to that group of people , in my experience, it’s not uncommon for people to be worried about which fork to use in a venue other than a restaurant of their choosing. Imagine the Red Lobster group going to a large, job-related lunch or dinner and being confronted with the " Formal" or " Banquet" place settings above.
I work in an office where nearly everyone has a bachelor’s degree and some have graduate degrees. We never go to a restaurant at a place where people have to know about which fork to use. I think the people who don’t care about which fork to use greatly outnumbers the number of those who do, even if you confine yourself to people in jobs that require college degrees.
Here is what Emily Post has to say about it:
https://emilypost.com/advice/formal-place-setting/
Note that there is no special advice about which fork to use (a large fork is a large fork?), except that the server should arrange the utensils “outside in”, and she explicitly states there should never be more than three of any implement on the table.
If you look closely at her place setting, note there is only one large (dinner) fork; she put a salad fork and fish fork next to it to balance out the number of utensils on the opposite side (regular knife + fish knife + tablespoon); there is no knife out for the salad course for instance. Basically the idea (in this case) is to have a pleasing, symmetric arrangement rather than to deliberately confuse anyone.
I have been to infinity-course banquets and I don’t remember the extra forks they brought out being any different from the regular dinner forks; they just gave you a clean fork to go with each additional dish. This may be incontrovertible proof I’m a bumpkin, who knows?
Depends on what you mean by “people who don’t care about which fork to use”. If you mean people who don’t care which fork other people use, yeah, they probably outnumber people who care about which fork other people use . If you mean people who don’t care about which fork they themselves use, and who wouldn’t be embarrassed if they ran out of forks before their tablemates or had one left over when their tablemates didn’t*, then you and I know very different people. Which is very likely true- the only time I ate at a restaurant before I could pay for it myself was on the single vacation we took in my entire childhood. And it would never have occured to me to go to a restaurant to find something different- who had enough money to pay for a meal you might not even like?
- for example, they used the same fork for their salad and main course so they have a fork left over.
It is still being taught where I live in the south (I can’t speak for the military). My teen was in a city-sponsored “leadership” program and one of the class days was a formal dinner with an etiquette instructor. Cotillion/social etiquette classes are still popular where I live among the middle class/private school sect.
I rarely eat out at high-end restaurants, but when I do for work or vacation, the thing that bothers me most isn’t the utensils but how differently the wait staff function during the meal. It took some getting used to.
Belle, not bell. Bells are found in belfries.
Not really? What I’ve seen is far less performative and more genuine than that. I suspect it’s a social skill built up over a lifetime of making up for a husband who has none whatsoever.
Regarding Vance’s use of the trope / cliche in the book, I believe it is used deliberately because it is a trope / cliche. In other words, it is instantly recognizable to any reader because of its use in entertainment going back at least a century. Using it is a shorthand for “rube in fish-out-of-water scenario”. Does that make it “hackery”, perhaps.
During my Navy days, I heard people making reference to “Knife and Fork School” (for freshly-minted officers) often enough that I never doubted that it was a thing.
I seem to recall the dinner with lots of silverware as part of a job interview for an ultra ritzy law firm, and acting socially adept was part of what the law firm used to evaluate the prospective hires. In that case, if you really have no clue how to use the various implements set out in front of you, I can see how it might panic you (especially if you’re not too confident about the whole interviewing process).
In Robert Heinlein’s Space Cadet which features the equivalent of the Naval academy, the cadets are taught the standard upper-class etiquette that they can be expected to encounter at higher levels of society wherever they go in the solar system (among humans). The example used is that “You learn to eat pie with a fork. Yes, I know you saw the governor of Texas eating a slice of pie with his bare hands at the state fair, but he doesn’t do that when eating with guests at the state house.”
Heinlein graduated from the US Naval Academy, and this seemed like an incident directly from his experience
I did have a waiter leap forward to correct my choice of fork once. I said, “Whoooeee! Goes to show you can take the girl out of the trailer park, but you cain’t take the trailer park out of the girl, don’t it? Can I get some ketchup here, please?”
Well, of course I didn’t, but it would have been funny if I had.
I’m not suggesting it doesn’t happen in real life, although it might have been embellished in Vance’s telling. I’m simply saying that it has become such a cliche that EVERYONE is familiar with it, such that in a film all you have to do is show someone sitting down at an elaborate place setting at a formal dinner, and the audience understands the implication.
Could be worse - you could have asked for salt