shovel? I don't know what you mean. Why would it look uncouth? I guess it would look like their momma never taught them table manners.

Wow. Even though I knew eating habits differed in the States it never occurred to me that my eating habits might be the ones that appeared ill-mannered!

Logically, of course they would.

Like the Aussies (as proved by the link) I was brought up to believe the trickiest form of eating was the most polite. Keep your fork in your left hand and any food not speared should be pushed up and balanced on the back of the fork. To scoop food up using the fork as you would a spoon was considered infantile and shovelly. I may have just made that word up.

I'm not suggesting that either is really right or wrong, but it is deeply ingrained in me for formal eating. I suppose it's because eating with cutlery is the first form of "manners" we are taught - to do something that isn't natural or logical in order to be polite.

In the nineteenth century there was comment on Americans eating food off of their knives. This is no longer done -- and it seems those instances when somebody commented on doing it that the spoon would have been the better instrument anyway. All that's left is this quatrain:

I eat my peas with honey;
I've done so all my life.
It makes the peas taste funny,
But it keeps them on my knife.

If you made the handle hollow to help with beverages, would it become a snorkel?

And how do you get peace, Homer? That's right: with a knife.

I've found that the only efficient way to eat Tater Tots(tm) is with chopsticks. I suppose a spoon might work, but that would be rude, wouldn't it.

Another very useful implement that hasn't been mentioned is the straw. A straw is nice because you don't have to stop eating to drink. If I don't have a straw, I usually just curl up my tongue into a straw shape, but it doesn't reach all the way to the bottom of the bigger beer mugs.

The problem I see with the three implements discussed (of which the fork was, by far, the last introduced, particularly to the US), is that most of us only have two hands, so unless you're a good juggler, you're always having to put one down, pick one up, put one down, pick one up...

If you drink beer through a straw you'll get pisseder quicker. ;)

One of the few pieces of knowledge I retained from college.

Hey, that rhymes.

I just jab Tater Tots with a fork, unless they're part of green-bean casserole, when handling the sauce also comes into things.

Indeed, I employ a fork's tines as a pitchfork on the arguable assumption that it's formed that way to facilitate spearing things on the plate. There was never any comment about cutting anything sufficiently tender with the side of a fork that I'd ever heard until reading that linked item. Give thought too to the reinforced outer tine(s) of the specialist salad fork: a leftover from the times when vinegar in salad dressing attacked the finish of a table knife's blade, so you didn't cut anything in a salad with the knife.

Today Slate posts a history of the fork, the latecomer to the knife-fork-spoon combo. It turns out the French, the original foodies, figured out the details. The lede: "Knives and spoons are ancient. But we’ve only been eating with forks for a few centuries." yeah!

That was an unexpectedly good read.

Serendipity. I was at Taco Hell last weekend and there was a box on the end of the counter with the descriptor SPORKS. I wondered if that's what they were always called or if they became that because it was a pre-internet meme that caught on? I remember Taco Hell's local inception and we loved those gadgets and thought 'spork' was the funniest thing ever.

I tried to get 'foon' to catch on. Nope.

You were bottle-fed as a baby, weren't you?

I just don't get the whole upside-down fork thing, at all.

First of all, just LOOK at it - it's designed to hold food in the curve, not for balancing food on the outside of the curve (see: gravity).

Beyond this, people who insist on trying to push food onto the outward curve/back of the thing and balance it there look a bit spastic to me, to be honest. Or maybe, mentally slow, as in "I have no clue what to do with this thing."

The link is dead. I'd love to hear the explanation for this bit of foolishness. And if "the trickiest form of eating is the most polite," why do we not stand on our heads or balance on one foot and eat that way? There is simply no logic to be found in this idea.

Why? It's certainly not the easiest way to get food from the plate to the mouth, so why "should" it be done that way? Does it make those who do it feel accomplished? Is it a fun dining game or something? Is the act of eating supposed to be made as difficult as possible? Why?

Why? And, if using the fork right-side up is considered infantile and shovelly, why isn't using a spoon the same way way considered just as infantile and shovelly?

Why is doing something that isn't natural or logical "polite?"

I've heard a lame explanation that people use their forks upside-down because fork tines pointing upward is considered crass (WHY?). If so, why aren't forks placed on the table upside down?

Yeah, it's like the fork is freaking flipping you off!