Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (32 page)

The appetite for disposable chopsticks, moreover, has spread to China, which now manufactures 63 billion pairs annually. By 2011, the Chinese demand for disposable wooden chopsticks was so great that it could no longer supply enough of the right kind of wood for its 1.3 billion citizens. An American manufacturing plant in Georgia has started to plug the gap. The state of Georgia is rich in poplar and sweet gum trees, whose wood is pliable and light enough to need no bleaching before it is made into chopsticks. The company, Georgia Chopsticks, now exports billions of disposable chopsticks to supermarket chains in China, Japan, and Korea, all with a label stating “Made in U.S.A.”

Those first American traders who arrived in China in the nineteenth century and struggled with chopsticks like “monkies with knitting needles” probably never thought the day would come when the United States would be supplying chopsticks to China. In the end, however, the two cultures—the knife-and-spoon culture and the chopstick culture—have more in common than appears at first.
When dining with one another, each of them may have secretly thought:
You barbarians!
But both cultures are united in their disdain for a third group, those who manage the business of eating without any tools at all.

 

P
rejudices are by definition not reasonable, so perhaps we should not be surprised that most of the prejudices against eating with fingers turn out to have little basis in fact, when examined closely. First, there is the notion that touching food is a sign of slovenliness; second, that eating with fingers demonstrates a lack of manners; and third, that having no eating utensils limits what can be eaten. The answer to these concerns are: (1) No, (2) No, and (3) Only sometimes.

Lack of cutlery does not signal lack of manners. Among people who consistently eat with fingers, performing elaborate ablutions becomes part of the rhythm of the meal. Even King Henry VIII, whose eating with fingers has become a byword for gross table manners, was actually far more attentive to both hygiene and etiquette than most sandwich eaters today. The king’s carver cleared away any crumbs using a voiding knife. Ushers provided him with napkins and swept specks of food off his clothing. At the end of the meal, a nobleman knelt before him with a basin, so that he could wash all traces of food off his hands. We may joke about Henry’s revolting manners, but how many of us stay half as clean during mealtimes?

A cultural preference for eating with fingers tends to make diners very sensitive to cleanliness. Ancient Romans washed themselves from top to toe before dinner. Arabs in the desert rub their hands with sand. Many Arabs today use a fork and spoon, but before a traditional Middle Eastern meal, writes Claudia Roden, guests are entertained on sofas, where their hands are cleaned:

In the ninth century, among Arabs, if a single guest so much as scratched his head after washing, everyone at the table would have to wait for him to wash all over again before they started to eat. The little finger bowls with which genteel Europeans cleanse their hands after eating something like shellfish seem filthy by traditional Indian standards: the Indian custom is that hands should not be dipped into a basin of water, where they are recontaminated with the dirt they give off, but should be showered with a stream of fresh water for each person.

Those who dine with fingers are also very particular about
which
fingers they use. Not only is the left hand kept out of action (because it is used for toileting and therefore “unclean”), but there are strictures on which fingers of the right hand should be used. For true politeness, in most cultures where food is handheld, only the thumb, forefinger, and middle finger are used. (As with the various knife-and-fork rules, there are exceptions. Couscous, because it is so fragmented, may be eaten with all five fingers.) Food should not be grabbed precipitously from the common dish. It is also very rude to anticipate the next bite before you have finished the first, which is not the rule among knife-and-fork eaters.

As for the question of whether finger-eating limits what can be eaten, the answer is that it does, but no more so than forks or chopsticks. The main limitation is temperature. Cultures that eat with fingers do not have the same fetish for piping hot food and hot plates that we do. “Are your plates hot, Hot, HOT?” asked society hostess Elsie de Wolfe in 1934, in a guide to “successful dining.” They’d better not be if you are eating with fingers. Room temperature, or a bit warmer, is the ideal for finger food. Fingers are also not the ideal tools for grappling with an English roast dinner: slabs of meat in gravy definitely call for cutlery.

In the countries of finger-eating, the food has evolved to fit, and hands have developed powers that the presence of cutlery denies them. Ottaviano Bon, a European traveler at the court of the “Turkish emperor” in the early seventeenth century, noted that the meat of
the emperor was “so tender, and so delicately dressed that . . . he needs no knife, but pulls the flesh from the bones very easily with his fingers.” Similarly, with a piece of Indian naan bread in one hand and a bowl of dal in the other, poised to dip and scoop, you do not feel the lack of a fork. Fingers are not just adequate substitutes for table utensils: they are better, in many respects. As Margaret Visser writes:

In Arab countries where eating with fingers is still the norm, people become dexterously nimble at manipulating food from hand to mouth. Many of the things that happen at mealtimes would be impossible with a fork: scooping up a ball of rice, then stuffing it with a piece of lamb or eggplant before popping it neatly into the mouth. No cutlery could improve on such a perfect and satisfying gesture.

The technology of tableware cannot be understood solely in terms of function. On pure utilitarian grounds, there is very little that you can do with the triumvirate of knife-fork-spoon or with chopsticks that you cannot do with fingers and a bowl (assuming that there is also some kind of cutting implement available). Table utensils are above all cultural objects, carrying with them a view of what food is and how we should conduct ourselves in relation to it. And then there are sporks.

 

T
he term
spork
is first recorded in a dictionary in 1909, though the first patent for one was only issued in 1970. Both the word and the thing are a hybrid of spoon and fork. Like a pencil with an eraser on the end, the spork is what theorists of technology call a “joined” tool: two inventions combined. In its classical form—fashioned from flimsy disposable plastic and given away at fast-food outlets—the spork has the scooping bowl of a spoon coupled
with the tines of a fork. It is not to be confused with a splayd, a knoon, a spife, or a knork.
⁵

Sporks have developed an affectionate following, of a somewhat ironic kind, in our lifetime. There are several websites devoted to them, proffering tips on use (“bend the prongs inward and outward and stand the spork on end. This is a
leaning tower of spork
”), haikus in their honor (“The spork, true beauty / the tines, the bowl, the long stem / life now is complete”), and general musings.
Spork.org
has this to say:

A spork is not one thing or another, but in-between. In the Pixar-animated film
Wall-E,
a robot in a postapocalyptic wasteland attempts to clear up the detritus left behind on planet earth by the human race. He heroically sorts old plastic cutlery into different compartments, until encountering a spork. His little brain cannot cope with this new object. Does it go with the spoons? Or the forks? The spork is uncategorizable.

Two years into his presidency, in 1995, Bill Clinton, pioneer of “Third Way” politics, made the spork the centerpiece of a humorous speech to the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, DC. He claimed that the spork was “the symbol of my administration. . . . No more false choice between the left utensil
and the right utensil.” He ended the speech, to rapturous applause and laughter: ”This is a big, new idea—the spork!”

Clinton was being funny, but the spork in its way really is a big new idea. Where did it come from? An urban myth circulates that sporks were first invented by General Douglas MacArthur as part of the US occupation of Japan in the 1940s. The story goes that MacArthur decreed that chopsticks were barbarian tools, whereas forks were too dangerous (the fear being that the conquered Japanese might rise up and use them as weapons). Therefore, the spork was forced on the Japanese as a safe, truncated version of Western tableware. This story cannot be right—as mentioned above, the name
spork
dates back to before 1909 and the form itself is still older: in nineteenth-century American silverware, both terrapin forks and ice-cream spoons were sporks in all but name (they were also known as “runcible spoons” after the Edward Lear poem). It is true that as far back as World War I, various armies used foldable spoon-fork combinations in the mess kit; but these were not true sporks but rather a spoon and a fork riveted together at the handle. These utensils are still used in the Finnish military: they are made from stainless steel and called
Lusikkahaarukka,
meaning spoon-fork.

The urban myth about MacArthur and the Japanese possibly arose because the first person to create a hybrid fork-spoon for the mass market was another McArthur, an Australian named Bill McArthur, of Potts Point, New South Wales, who in 1943 launched his patented Splayd—derived from the verb to splay—after seeing a magazine photo of women awkwardly balancing knives, forks, and plates on their laps at a party. Boxes of stainless-steel Splayds—which described themselves as “all-in-one knife fork and spoon gracefully fashioned”—were marketed as the ideal solution to the newly popular Australian barbecue. They have since become an Aussie institution, having sold more than 5 million units.

In the 1970s, Splayds were finally joined by Sporks. The name was trademarked in 1970 by a US company (the Van Brode Milling Company) and in 1975 by a UK one (Plastico Ltd.) as a combination
plastic eating utensil. It wasn’t long before they became standard issue in fast-food restaurants. The spork made business sense: two plastic utensils for the price of one.

Other important users of the spork included schools and prisons and any other institutional setting where the business of feeding is reduced to its most basic, functional level. American prison sporks are generally plastic, orange in color, and very ineffectual, because it is vital that they should not be used as weapons. In 2008, a man was arrested in Anchorage, Alaska, for attempting an armed robbery with a spork from a fried-chicken restaurant. The victim’s body was gashed with four “parallel scratches.” The most remarkable thing about this story is that anyone could have managed to do such damage with a spork, which in its fast-food incarnation is a pitiful implement, splintering into plastic shards on contact with any remotely challenging food.

In 2006, the spork was given a radical reboot, which tried to address some of its structural shortcomings. Joachim Nordwall is a Swedish designer employed by the outdoor supplies company Light My Fire. Having grown up in Sweden, Nordwall had no background in using the fast-food spork, and he was not much impressed by it. “It feels like a compromise to me,” he noted (to which one is tempted to say: duh!). The tines did not work well on their own terms as a fork. Nor did the bowl really work as a spoon: when eating soup, it would dribble out through the gaps. Nordwall’s breakthrough was to separate out the spoon part and the fork part, placing them on opposite ends of the handle. For good measure, he added a blade to the outer edge of the tines, thus turning his construction into a sort of knork as well as a spork. “Sporks get a new look,” raved a business review of Nordwall’s design. Really, though, it was very old. Nordwall had reinvented the double-ended medieval sucket spoon.

There is now a spork for every occasion, except a meal where any degree of formality is required. Light My Fire sells brightly colored sporks for campers and sporks for office workers, “lefty” sporks for the left-handed, and “spork little” for toddlers. Unlike previous utensils,
which always carried with them some cultural expectation of how you should behave in relation to food, the spork is entirely devoid of culture. It bends itself to the owner, rather than the other way around. It carries with it no particular mores and demands no etiquette. Eating with a spork is neither mannerly nor unmannerly. One of the many spork tributes on the Internet has fun with the notion of table manners for “sporkware,” advising: “When using a spork to eat mashed potatoes out of a Styrofoam container, it is common courtesy to leave a little ‘spork waste’ at the bottom rather than scrape the styrofoam with the spork to get every last morsel. If you must have every little bit of potato, please use your finger.”