Why chopsticks?

Factual Questions
21

I heard that chopsticks were used because it is uncouth to butcher your meat at the table. It is far more civilized to use chopsticks to pick up bits of a properly prepared meal.

I eat Japanese food with chopsticks, and i am beginning to eat Chinese food with chopsticks. I first learned to use them while drunk on saki so i had to relearn sober :slight_smile: I use chopsticks because they seem to work better with sushi and none of the people I know use a fork on japanese food.

I have found it was quite easy to become efficient in using them after going to lunch with coworkers and boss at least twice a week for sushi. Now I am trying to teach hubby how to use them.

I don’t see how it is an affectation any more than using any other utensil. I was introduced to crablegs recently and use those stupid nutcrackers and little forks. At home I have found my trusty swiss army knife does a much better and quicker job of removing meat from shell, but i don’t whip it out at a restaurant.

Why would wooden utensils be equated with disposable? Even whittling a good straight chopstick is not easy and i don’t even like to think about the attempt i made at carving a useful spoon. Bamboo chopsticks may be easier to make than wooden ones though.

JoeyBlades, I read somewhere (a magazine about 6 years ago) that a laboratory had found that wooden cutting boards and utensils actually did a better job of not harboring bacteria and keeping it away from food than did plastic. I have been trying to find reference to that study since. My wooden rolling pin, cutting board, and some of the better woooden spoons I own are all quite old and in some cases handme downs from my mother. I have never had any problems with any of these and food poisoning.

22

Why chopsticks? Well, it’s certainly easier to get the last pickle out of the jar with chopsticks than it is with a fork, that’s for sure.

The general rule of thumb for Asian foods: if the rice is eaten from a plate, use a fork; if the rice is eaten from a bowl, go for the 'sticks. So it’s ok to use a fork on the ‘rice plates’ that are common in Chinese restaurant lunch menus.

Incidentally, most Japanese consider sushi to be finger food, altho they will use their chopsticks to eat the pickled ginger that typically accompanies the sushi.

23

Another advantage of chopsticks is that you can hold a bowl in one hand and your 'sticks in the other, and eat without making an undue mess. Using a knife and fork requires two hands and therefore requires someplace to put the plate!

24 
My kids are Korean born. I'm heavily pre-disposed ( being a good daddy) to want to do these things the Korean way, opposed to the Chinese way. I'd never imagined that ANYONE would make food consumption such an excercise in torture, until I WENT to South Korea, and faced stainless steel chopsticks.

Holy shit. They’re thinner, and of course there is ZERO surface friction. It took a day or so to really become adept, I tried to avoid the “shovelling” method. ( I felt like it made me look like…well…like an inept White ). After a few days, I realized that the Shovelling method was THE preferred way to get the food into your mouth. So be it, when in Kyonggi-Do, do as the Korean do. Blend, baby, blend. The food was amazingly hot, and a bit boring ( fish fish fish fish fish fish hot fish fish tofu with fish fish and, to be different and zany, fish soup). They did let me cook on the last night, at the big party held at a local restaurant. THAT was fun- huge pink rubber hoses snaked all over the place, feeding gas to whichever grill they were hooked into.

 Of course, I lifted a pair of the stainless steel chopsticks. My kids are used to the wooded ones that come with Chinese food, when they got a load of the steel ones, they both cracked up. I tried not to make them feel like traitors to their heritage........

Cartooniverse

25

IMHO, I think that since the oriental tradition is to eat on a communal basis - plates of food in the middle of the table with everyone picking delicately as they please - it just became the tradition to use chopsticks so that one can pick out the food without touching pieces that others will want. There will be no need for serving utensils while minimizing the icki spread of one’s body fluids (and germs)! Stabbing with a fork is definitely crude and inexacting, showing the user’s barbarian heritage.

26

For what it’s worth…there’s a terrifically amusing children’s book by Ina Friedman called HOW MY PARENTS LEARNED TO EAT (Houghton Mifflin, 1984), illustrated by the great Allen Say.

In it, a little girl of mixed parentage relates the story of how her father, a US Navy sailor, and her mother, a Japanese schoolgirl, met and fell in love.

The girl thinks the guy doesn’t really like her because he’s never asked her out for a meal. He, of course, is terrified because he has no idea how to eat with chopsticks, and that she’ll consider him a moronic white guy.

He gets help from a waiter, painfully practices and learns how to get a meal down, then asks her to dinner. Now it’s her turn to be nervous, because she’s sure he’ll take her to a Western-style restaurant, and she has no idea how to eat with a knife and fork, and he’ll think she’s a naive Japanese schoolgirl.

It’s extremely funny to look at each culture’s table manners through the eyes of a foreigner. (Both sides are treated with equal respect/disrespect.) On top of which, the girl learns Western manners from her uncle, who’s lived in France, where of course the knife-and-fork technique is altogether different from America’s.

Anyway. There’s a happy ending, he proposes, and they end up producing the kid/narrator.

27

lee:

Ah. But things are much different now with advanced soaps, dishwashers, hotter water, and education that tells us that you shouldn’t use the same utensil to eat with that you used to pick up the raw chicken or fish…

Food born illness was a big problem up until only a few hundred years ago.

28

Actually, I saw a study that was done a while back showing that wood was actually the best work surface from the point of view of food poisoning.

(Of course, the main contender was plastic, which was not around in the times that we’re talking about. Still, it was an interesting data point)

They contaminated various surfaces with common food-borne bacteria, and waited for a while (overnight, I think). When they checked again, the wooden surfaces were far less contaminated than the others.

Not that I’m going to give up washing my wooden cutting boards, but it does speak well for the use of wood in food handling.

I will also point out that the threat of food-borne illness is still serious. In the guidelines for health just released by the American government, food safety gets a big section, right along side “get enough exercise” and “eat nutritious foods”.

29

Chinese food tastes better when you eat it with chopsticks.
Good American style pizza tastes better eaten on a plate with a fork.
Ramen (The restaurant kind) tastes better when you slurp it up.
Ethiopian food tastes better when you eat it with injera. With your fingers. So does Indian food.
Some soups taste better when you drink them from a mug.
Wine really does taste better when you use a proper wine glass, and not a water glass.
Hell, I’m a blue-collar guy from Bakersfield and I know all that. :wink:
Peace,
mangeorge

30

I found a reference at:
http://www.cspinet.org/nah/ja96.html

This refers to a 1994 scientific study which supports that wooden cutting board doesn’t spread bacteria as easily as plastic ones.

31

Ummm… Your cite sez this:

Which seems to support my statements. Just picking nits…

32

Mangeorge, that is just gross. Until you mentioned that you were from Bakersfield, I thought the only people to eat pizza with utensils :eek: were … Delawarians. And we all know about them.

V.

33

Okay, I have too much low culture in my life, but last night on CBS’ “Survivor” (kind of like the Real World meets Gilligan’s Island, except with a lawyer and a fundamentalist instead of the Howells) one of the marooned castmembers was shown whittling chopsticks, and later everyone eating with them around the fire. As many people have noted, if you have to improvise eating utensils, it’s a hell of a lot easier to make a few skinny sticks than a fork with tines and a handle.

I tend to agree that most Asian foods are easier to eat with chopsticks, most European foods with a knife and fork, and most North and Latin American foods with the hands. (A taco is not that different from a hot dog.) As for this:

“The bigger questions, IMHO, are why did chopsticks develop in the first place, and, given their inefficiency, why haven’t Western utensils replaced them.”

Yes, it would be inefficient to eat a burrito or a hamburger with chopsticks, but I should hope one’s diet consists of more variety than that. Try eating a green vegetable every now and again (no, iceberg lettuce doesn’t count). Your colon will thank me.

This brings up the subtopic of food safety. My understanding is that as long as you aren’t putting your raw or undercooked meat (especially beef or poultry) on the same cutting surface as your vegetable or dairy matter, you’re okay. One cutting board for meats, one for everything else, is what I have read to be the optimal configuration. (Since I don’t eat meat, raw or otherwise, I think I’m somewhat safe).

And finally, on antibacterial dish soaps: if you read the labels carefully, you will learn, much to your dismay, that these products do nothing to “disinfect” your dishes. They kill germs on hands, but not surfaces. This is why the fine print usually says something like “dish soap and ANTIBACTERIAL hand soap”). Even in commercials they are making no claims to this stuff protecting you from eating off a plate coated with flesh-eating bacteria. One thing about bacteria, however: lots of it is good for you. The preponderance of antibacterial solutions in the environment these days, some say, can kill all the good bacteria that protects you from illness and encourages proper digestion, among other things. Moreover, some also say that the use of antibacterial soaps is actually contributing to the development of superstrains of bacteria that are immune to the mere mortal concoctions of Palmolive and 409.

I know I should have made this two posts, but hindsight is 20-20. Thanks.

34

The most recent study that I saw said that washing your hands with any soap helps cut down on passages of germs not because the the soap kills the bacteria, but because it is a degreaser and rids your hands of greasy spots that germs cling to and live in. That is why it is so important to rub your hands instead of just applying soap and rinsing.

Actually removing all greasy spots on plastic dishes, especially ones that have been scarred by sharp utensils is nearly impossible. That is why when making angel food cakes it is best to use glass or metal bowls and wooden or metal utensils that have been washed and rinsed twice in very hot water. Chopsticks are certainly easier to clean thouroughly. Ever try to get all the froed egg from between the tines of a fork? I sometimes resort to floss just to make sure. As far as dipsosables, disposable chopsticks win over plastic fork any day.

What size magnification do you need to see germs? I want to take a look at some old cutting boards.

Chopsticks supposedly came into fashion because of the non violent teachings of Confucius. I would not be surprised to see them gain in further popularity now. I find it much easit to type one handed and use chopsticks rather than try to eat with a fork and knife between typing bouts.

35

Ooh, ooh, yeah - I knew there was something I meant to post before…

Quoted from a previous posting:

There may have been something to do with fuel, but according to one source that I saw, a traditional Chinese saying is “We come to the table to eat, not to carve up carcasses.”

It was this sentiment that guided the form of the dishes, and probably led to the popularity of chopsticks in the first place.

36

SuaSponte, I didn’t learn to eat pizza with a fork until I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. I was at a pizzaria with a friend, trying to nosh my very hot (tastes better hot) pizza. “Try using the fork. So you don’t burn your lips, dumbass.” say’s he. So I did just that.
Mmmm, nice hot pizza. No burned lips. Cool. :cool:
I can only assume that Delaware has better pizza than N.Y.
:smiley:
Seriouslly. Get yourself a yummy “Chicago” pizza, eat it piping hot, with a fork, and you’ll change your mind.
I won’t tell. :slight_smile:
Peace,
mangeorge