I go both ways. Depends on what I am eating, really. Otherwise, what **Excalibre ** said. Besides, my ancestors came here to get away from the way Europeans do things!
If I’m eating something that can be cut with the side of a fork’s tines, I’ll do that, keeping the fork in my right hand the whole time. If I have to cut off a bite with a knife and then eat the bite with a fork, I’ll do the “zig-zag method.”
This has nothing to do with how I was taught though; it’s just that I’m likely to stab myself in the eye (or more likely get food all over myself) if I try to use my left hand to get a fork into my mouth.
Likewise! You cut-then-swap-hands lot are endlessly amusing. It is is very hard to see how swapping hands is somehow efficient!
Right. I totally agree. That’s why leftys have such a hard time writing, too. When they hold a pencil, the eraser is pointing DOWN.
How do they do it?
Sir, I challenge ye to a utensil-wielding eating contest of T-bone steak, mashed potatoes, baby peas and blueberry pie. I predict that I will clean my plate more quickly, less pretentiously and with more refinement than thou. Heck, I’ll probably be pickin’ my teeth clean with my fork tines before you even get to the pie. 
Since when was eating about efficiency or speed? 
Sure, if your food goes stone cold before you’ve finished it, maybe you need to review your strategy (or just warm the plates properly) but sheesh! Way to lose sight of the objective folks.
Eating with the fork in the left hand and the knife in the right isn’t clumsy at all if you’ve been brought up to do it.
Eating with the fork in the rich hand isn’t sloppy or lazy if that’s the prevailing habit in your culture; Likewise eating with chopsticks, a spoon or with your fingers from a rice bowl.
There’s one thing more annoying than people eating the wrong way and that’s people being smug about eating the ‘right’ way. I happen to be someone who uses knife and fork in the standard ‘Brit’ way, so I’m not particularly saying this for self-justification.
Well said, old bean. Dining (or “eating”) shouldn’t be a NASCAR or Formula-1 race. What’s wrong with a little refinement and elegance, folks? There’s so little left in contemporary society. Dining with proper table manners is a marvelous thing.
On another note, I will say that the haughtiness and preaching typically associated with table manners is found far more among Euros looking down upon the American “zig zag” method, rather than vice versa. All too many Euros simply cannot restrain themselves from making condescending comments or stares, which is the hallmark of poor manners. A Brit may claim his method is far more efficient, but when were manners of any kind rooted in efficiency and speed? If efficiency is your benchmark, go Caveman.
I like both a well-executed Euro and AmeriZag method. It’s poor table manners that drive me nuts.
I do that too. I cannot imagine why you’d do it any other way, but to each his own.
Really, if you keep your mouth closed when you’re chewing and don’t splatter food all around, you can get by with whatever utensil approach you like.
I makes you like me.
It’s all about speed and efficiency, Mr. Bean. Do you think that when our prehistoric ancestors wrested wildebeest carcass entrails from the slobbering mouths of hyenas that they bothered to shift their forks from left to right? Not, bloody likely, Jelly Bean. On the African savanna, the English non-zig-zag method reined supreme, Beano.
Speed and efficiency are not the most important factors, but they may be factored in at some point, after the more important factors are met… and that’s a fact.
If both methods may be considered aligned with refined etiquette and good manners, then, and only then, should speed and efficiency take precedence over bungling wackiness. Anyway, that’s my take on the matter, old Stringbean 
Of course it mattered to our ancestors, but so did things like being able to start a fire by rubbing sticks together… how many of us can do that today? -I can, but how relevant is it in modern culture?
Lots of these soft social questions have more than one right answer, or at least more than one answer that is not absolutely wrong. Humans invented knives and forks, why shouldn’t they have a choice about how they use them? If they had been handed, ready-made to Moses amid smoke and fire on the mountaintop, along with a strict set of instructions on their proper use, then perhaps I’d be more sympathetic. Although maybe not.
Can anyone make an objective case that any of the proferred methods of using a fork and knife is more “elegant” than the others?
Both methods are equally elegant so long as you raise your pinkies and comport yourself with smug indifference…and refrain from audible bouts of flatulance.
So an SBD is ok?
Quite so. So long as you don’t sit next to me.
I don’t understand the aversion that table-manners mavens seem to have to efficiency and speed. I can’t think of any reason not to eat in the easiest and most efficient way possible (without totally grossing out other people at the table). A lot of rules of etiquette don’t seem to promote speed or efficiency, but they usually have a purpose of making other people more comfortable. I don’t even notice how other people use their forks and knives, so I can’t imagine how using a fork and knife in a certain way would make others more comfortable. So this kind of thing seems to me to be inefficient for no good reason.
efficiency and speed simply aren’t necessarily all that important; not everything in life needs to be (or even should be) reduced to a clinical time-and-motion study - I think a lot of people (including me) believe that doing so diminishes some of the pleasure of the experience; for example, slicing into a moist tender, rare steak and carving off a piece of it to spear with your fork is arguably far less efficient than having someone else cut it into neat cubes that you can pick up with a spoon, but I just don’t want to be treated like that; similarly, someone could cut the kernels off my corn cob for me and give them to me in a bowl - again, with a spoon. That would be really efficient - I could probably eat them in half the time with no mess, but I want to tear them directly off the cob with my own teeth, while the butter runs down my chin, then I want to scour the gnawed cob over again, in the vain search for any missed bits - it’s vastly less efficient and dammit, it’s the way I want it to stay.
I’ve eaten both ways… I started the “other” way when we lived in Europe. But I never quite got the hang of eating stuff off of my fork when it was upside down.
Now I eat Thai style. It trumps the heck out of either of the others in efficiency, although it does somewhat require the foodstuffs to be either precut or easily dissected.
Grew up eating American-style. Then I went to Germany for ayearat the age of seventeen. My host brother asked his dad why I was eating like that. I quickly learned the German style and I have never gone back. However, all foods that don’t require knives are eaten with my fork in my right hand. I think it’s easier and I don’t get any funny looks from Americans - I think it really is a european thing to notice how one uses their utensils. For example, I haven’t a clue how my boyfriend uses his fork and knife, and we eat lunch and dinner together almost every day.
I use both methods. My mother is English and contends that european forks are weighted differently than american ones. American forks want to flip over when held tines up.