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October 9, 2000
CHOPSTICKS: THE PERFECT UTENSIL
I don't mind eating with my fingers -- fried chicken still feels weird to me unless I'm holding the piece in my hands -- but of course most of the time I use utensils the way I was taught as a child. Utensils are a product of civilization -- without them we'd all be shoving food in our mouths using our hands, and everything would be served like fried chicken, in handy holdable pieces.
| As he got older, my father simply gave up eating rice with chopsticks and reached for the fork -- "more efficient," he said. |
I've also been known to pick up pieces of sushi with my hands and wolf them down while no one's looking, stuffing them into my mouth using my fingers. But the majority of the food I consume is made to be eaten with utensils, so I try to be at least a little civilized when I dine.
Knives were invented first because they were used as weapons, and only evolved into utensils for the table in recent centuries. In fact, knives were used as forks, to spear food on the plate, so they had pointed tips until King Louis the XIV of France outlawed pointed knives and had them all rounded to what we know today as table knives. Spoons have been around almost as long, having evolved from shells or chips of wood used as scoops, but it took the Romans to create the oval-shaped spoon attached to a handle with the decorative end.
The ancient Greeks first used forks for holding meat for carving, and by the 7th century Common Era (CE), smaller forks were used at the table in the Middle East. The first forks were brought to England in 1608 from Italy, and were laughed at as an effeminate, unnecessary tool (they probably couldn't imagine not using heir hands to hold their turkey drumsticks), and only became commonplace only after the wealthy began using them as a sign of their status.
But my favorite utensils in the world are chopsticks, which are much older than any of the Western utensils.
Chopsticks were developed about 5,000 years ago in China. One theory on their evolution is that people used to cook their food in large pots which held heat for a long time, and diners broke twigs off trees to retrieve the food. By 400 BCE (Before the Common Era), food began to be chopped into small pieces so it could be cooked rapidly to conserve fuel. Chopsticks have been ideally suited to small pieces of food ever since.
The Chinese call chopsticks kuaizi, and they've been used as far back as in the Shang Dynasty (C.1600-C.1100 BCE). "Records of the Historian" written by Sima Qian of the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) mentioned that more than 3,900 years ago, Zhou, a famous despot, used chopsticks made from elephant tusk.
Like many other things about their culture, the Japanese adapted the Chinese chopsticks. In Japan they're called hashi (bridge), and they differ in design from Chinese chopsticks -- they're shorter, rounded and come to a point than Chinese chopsticks. Starting in the 17th century, the Japanese were the first to lacquer these wooden chopsticks, which made them slippery but quite durable. There are people who today collect the thousands pf variations of chopsticks, especially the beautifully decorated lacquer-coated pairs. The Japanese were also the first to create disposable wooden chopsticks (called "wari-bashi") in 1878.
It has occurred to me recently that the companies that design the plastic inserts for kitchen drawers only create spaces for knives, forks and spoons, and we Asians have to figure out where to put our every-expanding pile of chopsticks. I grew up using a selection of lacquered hashi, but because they made picking up tiny bits of food like individual grains of rice or peas, I more often turned to the larger collection of used wari-bashi that we kept in the utensil drawer. As he got older, my father simply gave up eating rice with hashi and went for the fork -- "more efficient," he said, even though Japanese-style rice is cooked to a stickier consistency than in any other Asian country or certainly in Western-style dishes, so it's easier to pick up clumps with chopsticks.
Because I use chopsticks for eating ramen and other noodle dishes, so it's no big deal for me to eat spaghetti with hashi. I wouldn't do it in a restaurant, but at home, the first choice of utensil seems to be chopsticks more often than not, no matter what type of food is on the table.
I also use chopsticks extensively for cooking, reaching for them first before the spatula even if the cuisine isn't Asian.
I can probably write a book about the 1001 uses for recycled chopsticks: The disposable ones are good for propping up small plants, and I have even used them for picking up dog poop -- hey, I throw them away after each use, and it's better than putting your hand into a plastic bag and grabbing the stuff!
But there's a serious side to the use of the ubiquitous disposable chopsticks that you can find at any Asian restaurant.
Japan is the world's largest producer and consumer of disposable chopsticks, and the huge amounts of wood needed for this consumption is being torn out of the rainforests of South Asia. Thailand lost 26 percent of its rainforests between 1973 and 1985, and Cambodia 24 percent. Vietnam has lost 19 percent of its rainforests. Environmentalists the world over are concerned about the depletion of those resources, especially since most of the wood is going for a product that is by definition wasteful.
The solution? I'm going to try to bring chopsticks with me when I dine at an Asian restaurant, and keep taking any disposable chopsticks I use either home or to the office, where I now have a growing stash of hashi to use when I bring my lunch.
Maybe if I use them at the office enough, others will see that chopsticks are the perfect utensil, and I can convert everyone from their forks.