Knife fork and spoon
 

It's a little amazing: as much as we are innovators, nobody has improved on the basic tools of eating. They're damn near perfect.

Sure, people have futzed around with the handles, and the sizes, and the materials and the blade sharpness and the number of tines - rudely suggesting that 3 gets it done better than 4. But it always comes back to the basics, because there's nothing better.

Some people around here like to eat with chopsticks when they're eating something culture-appropriate, but deep down inside they know that the basic three would get the job done better.

We can agree that while some foods have been made finger-appropriate over the years, eating with your hands is basically a sick practice. Unless you go through some sort of surgeon-like pre-meal cleansing. And maybe even wear latex gloves after that.

But then there's the opposite practice, of imagining that your butter knife needs to be separate, that you need two different spoons, etc. Maybe a salad fork makes sense. After that, let's just agree that a little of your jelly in my butter isn't going to end the world.

The finger foods are decadent, and maybe fun, but the best meals seem to be those that require all three of the tools.

All hail knife fork and spoon.

I disagree! If it wasn't culturally unacceptable I'd eat most food with my fingers, and I don't think any implement copes as well with rice.

Food is prepared by people, eaten by people, digested by people. If my hands do the cooking they are certainly clean enough to do the eating. If someone else's hands do the cooking then why suddenly take against my own at the end of the process?

We evolved eating with our hands and I'm pretty sure our guts can cope with what we may perceive these days to be an insanitary act. I'm happy enough to eat a peck of dirt before I die.

I'm with Sundae on this one.

If you prefer knife fork and spoon, then how do you eat steamed conch in the shell? It necessitates chopsticks. Well, chopstick anyway. A fork would not do unless it was perhaps an olive fork. Something long and slender to skewer the conch and twist it out...

Please don't get any jelly or crumbs in my butter. just sayin.

certainly a lot better than simply one's fingers, or a knife. I'm sure there are several billion people who would argue with you about chopsticks, though.

One thing I will say: Never buy a cute fork that has a smooth, cylindrical handle--like a straw or a bamboo shaft. I bought several of those and they are functionally useless--you cannot put pressure on them to cut food with the side of the fork.

and they fall through the dishwasher basket. :(

What about the spork?

The utensil of the devil.

No, that's a pitchfork.

I like a bit of spork.
When I worked in promotions, giving free food samples in the local supermarket, I half-inched a packet to use at home. Shames me now (workplace theft, disposable culture adding to the landfill sites etc) but they served me well for a couple of weeks. I saw it as my just reward for days spent hawking melons.

"half-inched" ??? is that the five-finger-discount?

Aye - to my eternal shame.
Rhyming slang - half-inched = pinched

hate sporks.

I like those "grapefruit spoons" with the serrated edge. Put one of those serrated edges on a spork, and you'd really have something.

A snork.

sknork? better patent that

I use chopsticks quite a bit, especially with any noodles & salads.

Chop sticks ROCK , I made a pair in the jungle once ,
Knife fork spoon , all good , unless ,,,,,,
This is just a personal pet peve but I can't stand a flat fork or spoon , by flat I meen that the tip of the tigns or the tip of the spoon is in line with the handle , they SHOULD cruve UP !!!
Again just some of my personal weirdness .

Not "personal weirdness", the flat ones are so hard to use I always find a way to put a bend in them..

I made them, or brought them, in Scouts a lot. Got a lot of flack about it, but never minded.
Taught it as part of my course on wilderness survival.

Somebody linked to an Australian-made doo-flinkey that had the spork on one end and a butter knife blade on the other. I forget what they call the beast.

But you'd need a pair of them to cut a grilled chop. Then what? -- eating, one for each hand?

Fork/spoon/knife better than chopsticks, or the other way around, overall? Not quite. The real determiner is the food-holder; chopsticks work with rice bowls, which you can lift to your lips and shovel with the sticks. Sticks don't mesh so well with flat plates -- try picking a flat plate up and holding it that way; you'll look like a white Ubangi. A flat plate is where the European three-item combo shines.

The rounded-off shape of the table knife is said to have been invented by Cardinal Richelieu after a dinner he didn't enjoy very much. The Cardinal was of a fastidious disposition, and his dinner guest finished his meal by using his table knife's point to pick his teeth, quite putting the Cardinal off his digestion. The next day he had a servant busy grinding all the points off his tableware.

There is a time and a place for all eating utensils. Including fingers.

There's nothing wrong with ingesting a bit of grot from under you nails. It'll make you live longer. ;)

I hate plastic utensils. They shit me to tears.

Our Friend The Google.

Searching on the terms "spork knife Australian" got me to the Splayd.

i'd vote chopsticks as all-around most useful.

i like 'em cuz they're used one-handed and held only in one position/direction (think of the twisting and rotation of the wrist involved with the use of a fork, not to mention grip/position changes for different actions like stabbing and scooping).

can be used to pick up items of various shapes and sizes, a) without piercing them and b) using variable amounts of pressure.

shape and size make them useful for cooking and prying (eating shellfish).

i dunno. who needs a knife? just pick up that whole steak and bite the damn thing. eat soup like a chinese person - use chopsticks to pick out the large chunks, then tip the bowl back and slurp.

And rather tangentially, there's this conversation on American, Australian, and European styles of using the knife and fork. Longish, but a fun read. Splayds occur at the very bottom of the column. In plastic.

Now the fella who tries eating a baked potato in Breakingnews' twofisted way with butter and sour cream on it is gonna suffer, given the way baked potatoes hold their heat. Maybe Breaking doesn't hold with sauces, I dunno.

The chopstick wielders basically have to have their food brought to them already cut in bite-size pieces from the kitchen. A Chinese ambassador harrumphed about this a few hundred years ago: "What barbarians! They bring their swords to the table."

you can pick half a chicken up with a good set of chopsticks. Why can't you just take a bite out of it?

My understanding is that it is acceptable use of chopsticks to pick up a two bite piece at the table. Not recommended for sushi or sashimi.

While I was one quarter joking about the conch eating with one chopstick, it is sold to you with two, and there's no way you are going to eat that in two bites.

I'd eat a halved chicken with my hands before eating it with chopsticks. I suppose I'd eat stewed chicken off the bone with chopsticks, but anything that requires tearing away from the bone is too challenging with chopsticks.

Except eating conch out of the shell...

the link about the cultural differences is pretty interesting. I never knew that there was a cultural prohibition about using the side of the fork to cut.

I do know that I was taught it was polite either way: that is, when using a knife and fork simultaneously, it was all right to convey the food to the mouth with your fork in the less-dominant hand; OR to put the knife down, switch the fork to the dominant hand, and then eat.

But when I do use my fork that way (in my non-dominant hand) it's always meat or other spearable items. I would never use the back of my fork for mashed potatoes and peas--THAT would really look uncouth. To me. Like you were born in a barn.

Why would that look uncouth? I don't see the point there. Over here it's considered basic manners to turn your fork over for stuff like that.

Would you just shovel mash and peas into your mouth???

I noticed a huge table etiquette difference when I was in the states. The shovel method took a lot of getting used to and my *habits* raised some eyebrows.

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!

Quick note to Sundae: I'm sincerely not trying to be a bitch toward you at all, and I apologize if it might seem that way. I just used your comments as a launching point for my confusion and frustration over the silly fork thing. :heart-on:

While eating "properly", the empire slipped away.

I would like to read the article too. I never quite learned the western table manners. I only learned what the other school kids taught me while eating in the cafeteria. "Don't chew with your mouth open; don't talk with your mouth full; don't put your elbows on the table." (No, I've never really talked with my mouth full because I've always been a slow eater and never had much friends to talk to at lunch time. I did, however, put my elbows on the table.)

It's rude to point, and now, you're uncouth and infantile to use a fork to scoop up your food. Hmm....I'm rather glad I've always been somewhat a hermit. I would hate to appear so uncivilized.

We need a standing ovation smilie.

That was outstanding.

There's an infographic for everything... even this.

...though the spife looks like the kind of stone knives Man has been making since ever.

Attachment 39360

I want a Knork!

and I want to pronounce it Kuh-Nork.


because Norks are tits.

holy shit

That's what I'm talking about!

I always considerd a spork with a sharpened edge to be a sknork, pronounced "snork".

"Spork" sounds funny because it sounds like the name of a Vulcan who didn't make it into Star Fleet.

butter

Silverware used to be treasure. Now it's almost trash and people treat it that way. I've seen some antique silverware pounded in to garden stake shapes to label your various herbs in the garden.

Don't need it for pizza.

Plus, digital photography killed the silver value.