Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (31 page)

In the nineteenth century, two distinct methods emerged for handling a knife and fork. The first was christened by the great etiquette guru Emily Post as “zigzag” eating. The idea was to hold your knife in the right hand and fork in the left as you cut up everything on the plate into tiny morsels. You then put the knife down, seized the fork in the right hand, and used it to “zigzag” around the plate, scooping up all the morsels. At first, this method was common throughout Europe, but it later came to be seen as an Americanism, because the English devised a still more refined approach. In English table manners, the knife is never laid down until the course is finished. Knife and fork push against one another rhythmically on the plate, like oars on a boat. The fork impales; the knife cuts. The knife pushes; the fork carries. It is a stately dance, whose aim is to slow down the unseemly business of mastication. Both the Americans
and the British secretly find each other’s way of using a fork to be very vulgar: the British think they are polite because they never put down their knives; Americans think they are polite because they do. We are two nations separated by common tableware, as well as by a common language.

In the four hundred years since Thomas Coryate marveled at Italian meat-forks, our food has changed immeasurably, yet our dependence on the fork largely has not; we use them more now than ever. Like the colander, in use since ancient times, it is an example of a kitchen technology that has stuck. Although we may abandon it to munch a hamburger or to attempt to use chopsticks in a Chinese restaurant, the fork is entirely bound up with our experience of eating. We are so used to the sensation of metal (or plastic) tines entering our mouths along with food, we no longer think anything of it. But our use of forks is not inconsequential—it affects our entire culinary universe. As Karl Marx observed in the
Grundrisse,
“The hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth.” Forks change not just the
how
of eating but the
what.

Which is not to say that forks are always superior to other methods of eating. As with every new kitchen technology from fire to refrigeration, from eggbeaters to microwaves, forks have drawbacks as well as benefits. The Renaissance opponents of the fork were right, in many ways. Knives and forks are handy enough for cutting a slice of roast beef, but are more hindrance than help for eating peas or rice, which are better served by the humble spoon. Eating with a knife and fork carries with it a complacency that is not always justified. It is a very fussy way of eating food. We often overattribute efficiency to the technologies we are accustomed to. Because we use knives and forks every day, we do not notice how they hamper us. Our table manners require us to use two hands to perform with less dexterity what chopsticks can do with only one.

 

M
onkies with knitting needles would not have looked more ludicrous than some of us did,” commented one of those present on the first recorded occasion of Americans eating Chinese food in China, in 1819. Chinese hosts in Guanzhou were entertaining a party of American traders. A procession of servants brought in a series of “stewed messes” and dishes of bird’s-nest soup, plus plenty of boiled rice. “But alas!” recalled one young trader from Salem, Massachusetts,”no plates and knives and forks.“ The Americans struggled to ingest any of the feast with the sticks provided until at last their hosts took pity and ordered knives, forks, and spoons to be brought.

There is sometimes a similar moment when Westerners eat out at a Chinese restaurant. Halfway through dinner, you notice that someone is silently blushing because he has no idea how to use chopsticks and is struggling to get anything in his mouth. It takes tact on the part of the restaurateur to rustle up a spoon and fork without making the customer feel stupid. A Chinese woman who settled near Harvard in the 1950s noted that when entertaining Americans, it was important to have forks ready for emergencies, but also important not to press them on guests who insisted on practicing ineptly with chopsticks. The Western knife-and-fork eater faced with chopsticks for the first time is reduced to the level of a clumsy child. The ability to use chopsticks is like literacy, a serious skill, not easy to master, but essential to being a fully functioning member of society in China, Japan, or Korea. For the first few years of a child’s life in China, it is fine to use a spoon. After that, a child may have chopsticks joined together with napkins and rubber bands, to form a kind of makeshift tongs. But on reaching secondary school age, the window of forgiveness has passed. You are now expected to know how to wield your chopsticks dexterously To fail to do so would be taken as a sign of bad parenting.

The earliest pair of surviving chopsticks are bronze, from the Ruins of Yin and dated around 1200 BC, so we know that they have been in use for at least 3,000 years. But it was only from around the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) that they became the universal
method of eating all over China. The rich had chopsticks made of bronze, ivory, jade, or finely painted lacquer; the poor had simple wooden and bamboo ones. At the imperial table, silver chopsticks were used, not just for their luxury but to aid in the detection of poison: the idea was that the silver would turn black if it came into contact with arsenic. The downside was that silver is heavy, conductive of heat (becoming too hot when in contact with hot food and too cold in cold food) and—this is a pretty basic flaw—bad at picking up food (the silver does not provide enough friction, making them slippery). Eventually, therefore, silver chopsticks were abandoned, despite their beauty and poison-detecting potential, because they violated one of the most basic aspects of Far Eastern table manners: the duty to demonstrate enjoyment of the deliciousness of what was on the table. It was easier to show pleasure with porcelain chopsticks.

As seen in Chapter 1, the use of chopsticks went along with an entirely different approach to cuisine than in Western cooking. Because chopsticks only lift food rather than chopping it, all the knife work could be hidden away in the kitchen. “Everything is served cut up,” noted Fletcher Webster in 1845, another American traveler to China. The chopping skills of the cook thus saved those at the table from all the worries a Western diner faces about how to subdivide the food on his or her plate without looking uncouth. How to eat corn on the cob politely was not a dilemma faced by any Chinese eater, not just because corn was not grown in China, but because for the cook to lump such a large object on the plate would itself have been unimaginably rude.

The system of eating with chopsticks eliminates the main Western taboos at table, which chiefly have to do with managing the violence of the knife. The French theorist Roland Barthes, who saw symbols everywhere but especially at the table, argued that chopsticks were the polar opposite of the knife. Holding a knife makes us
treat our food as prey, thought Barthes: we sit at dinner ready “to cut, to pierce, to mutilate.” Chopsticks, by contrast, had something “maternal” about them. In expert hands, these sticks handle food gently, like a child:

Despite their basic gentleness, however, it is still possible to cause offense when eating with chopsticks. Superficially, Chinese table manners are more relaxed than traditional European and American ones: the table setting consists of nothing but a single pair of chopsticks and a three-piece porcelain set consisting of a spoon, a bowl, and a small plate. When Florence Codrington, a British woman in China in the early twentieth century, invited a Chinese “old lady friend” to her house to eat dinner English style, she “ran round and round the table in wild excitement, touching everything in turn and then held her sides laughing. ‘Ai-a! it is laughable, it is surprising!’ she gasped, ‘all these tools to eat a meal with!!’” Unlike the traditional Western procession of individual courses, Chinese dishes are set on the table to share communally, with everyone picking at the same time. It is not rude to reach across others for a far-off dish. Chinese food writer Yan-Kit So observed that the “likelihood of chopsticks clashing is minimal.”

On the other hand, because Chinese cuisine is part of a culture of frugality, there are strict rules about eating food in such a way that neither waste nor the appearance of waste is allowed, particularly when it comes to rice. The way in which everyone shares dishes may seem random, but a mark of good manners is that no one present should be able to tell what your favorite dish is; in other
words, you should not dig your chopsticks greedily into the same dish too often. As for rice eating, the bowl should be raised to the lips with the left hand, while the chopsticks shovel the rice in. Every last grain of rice must be eaten. British children who leave food on their plates are warned to think of the starving in Africa. Chinese children—who eat several small helpings from a bowl instead of a single heaping plateful—are given a different, more persuasive, admonition against wastefulness: to think of the sweat on the brow of the farmer who grew their rice.

The Japanese came to chopstick culture later than the Chinese (from whom they borrowed the idea), but you would not know it now, from the way that chopsticks shape the entire culinary universe of the country It was only around the eighth century AD that chopsticks supplanted hands among the common people, but having done so, they rapidly became essential to the Japanese way of eating. Japanese chopsticks tend to be shorter than Chinese ones (around 22 cm as against 26 cm), and they have pointed ends rather than flat ones, allowing for the most minute specks of food to be picked up. If a food can neither be eaten with chopsticks nor drunk from a bowl, it used to be said, then it is not Japanese. As Japanese food has become globalized in recent decades, this rule no longer holds, entirely. Among the young of Tokyo and Osaka, two of the most popular dishes are breaded pork
katsu
cutlet—which is usually sliced on the diagonal in slices that require further cutting with a knife—and “curry,” a strange all-purpose spicy sauce, gloppy and redolent of canteen food, which many in Japan adore. This curry cannot be eaten with chopsticks and is too thick to drink from a bowl: it calls for a spoon. Another popular Japanese food is the white bread “sando,” imitations of the British sandwich, made from sliced white bread stuffed with mayo-heavy fillings. It is held, as every true sandwich must be, in the hand.

Nevertheless, what is eaten and how it is eaten in Japan are still largely shaped by chopsticks, and there are a series of very specific forms of behavior that must be avoided when holding them.
In addition to the obvious taboos against using chopsticks in such a way as to suggest violence—pointing them in someone’s face, sticking them upright in a plate of food—there are more subtle transgressions. These include:

There are also taboos about the sharing of chopsticks. The Shinto religion has a horror of impurity or defilement of any kind. There is a belief that something that has been in someone else’s mouth picks up not merely germs, which would be killed by washing, but aspects of their personality, which would not. To use a stranger’s chopsticks is therefore spiritually disgusting, even when they have been washed. Professor Naomichi Ishige is an anthropologist of Japanese food who has published over eighty books. He once conducted an experiment on some of his Japanese seminar students, asking them: “Suppose you lend an article that you use to someone else, who uses it, and then thoroughly cleans it before returning it to you. Which article would you have the strongest sense of psychological resistance against reusing afterward?” The two objects that most often cited were a pair of undergarments “for the lower part of the body” and a pair of chopsticks.

This goes some way toward explaining the phenomenon of
waribashi,
disposable chopsticks made from a small piece of cheap wood
almost split in half, ready for the customer to pull apart and use. It is sometimes assumed that these
waribashi
are a modern Western influx, akin to polystyrene cups. But this is not so: they have been used ever since the beginnings of the Japanese restaurant industry in the eighteenth century, because giving a fresh pair of chopsticks to all customers was the only way a restaurateur could assure his clientele that what they put in their mouth was not defiled. They are a good example of how what we are prepared to accept in the way of the technology of eating is often determined more by cultural forces than function. Richard Hosking, a British expert on Japanese food, argues that “from the point of view of a foreigner not entirely at ease with chopsticks, waribashi are wretched,” because their shortness makes them tricky for large-handed people. They also have an annoying tendency to splinter apart the wrong way, forcing you to undergo the embarrassment of asking for another pair. Worse than that,
waribashi
are an ecological disaster. Japan now uses and throws away around 23 billion pairs per year.