Which comes first - the food or the implement?

"Bringing food to one’s mouth is one of the most basic fundamental actions of human existence, but throughout history we have come up with various ways of doing it." Peril

Today I had a yum cha lunch with my Italian classmates. Yes yum cha, for one of our classmates is Chinese and one Malaysian. The Chinese lady organises it all and we all just eat. And of course we ate with chopsticks. Which made me ponder on the efficacy or not of chopsticks as opposed to any other way of eating. Or is it that the implement has developed in response to the kind of food that is eaten?

And coincidentally I remembered that the other day our son's Mongolian partner told us that they did not use chopsticks in Mongolia. They use a knife and fork. For Mongolia, it seems, as well as being completely of itself of course, is more Russian than Chinese.

So I googled and found that, of course, other people have done this before, and probably rather more entertainingly and informatively than me, but I'll give it a go. Thrillist was my starting point article and I picked up other bits here and there.

Opinion seemed to differ as to whether the spoon or the knife came first. I think I lean towards the spoon, although actually, of course, the very first implement to be used for eating was the hand - which is still the primary way of eating for a third of the world's people. I will return to hands.

I'm talking about prehistoric peoples - when they were transforming from apes to man and when they began cooking food. Because I guess that is where the need for an implement began. Just eating raw food whether meat or vegetable only required hands. Cooked food is hot, so hands are limited - both in retrieving the food from the fire and in eating it too. I guess you can let it cool off a bit, or you can perhaps hold the food by a bit of bone that might be less hot, but I suspect that they used something simple to hold it while you ate. I do find it hard to visualise though - you could hold a chunk of roast meat down with anything of the right shape, but then you would have to bend down to eat it. You could wrap a bit of fur round it I suppose, but I guess the obvious thing to use would be a sharpened stick that you could stick into it. Yes - that's what they must have done - and so developed eventually, the fork - initially with one prong, and then two for centuries and centuries. Two prongs hold the meat more securely. And thus also developed the skewer and skewered meat. Which you can eat with your hands.

"invention takes place in response to dissatisfaction at the shortcomings of an already existing way of doing things." Henry Petroski

Simultaneously maybe they developed the knife - well sharp objects to cut up the meat and divide it between the tribe, but once they started throwing meat and vegetables into water to cook they would have needed something else - the spoon. Which a whole lot of other people think is the first eating implement. Beginning with spoon shaped objects - shells, large seeds, etc. At the same time they must have developed pots to cook in and smaller pots to serve it in - also initially probably shells or hollowed out stones or pieces of wood. They have found spoons in ancient Egypt where they were used ritually as well.

Meanwhile in China they used knives to cut up food in the kitchen and chopsticks to stir the noodles. For it seems they have been eating noodles since ancient times. A dramatic increase in population meant that there was not much food and so food tended to be in very small portions - no knife necessary - hence the chopsticks moved from the kitchen to the dining room. I still wonder about chopsticks though. They're not an obvious way of holding things are they? Although I suppose they are sort of tongs without the spring.

"The influential Chinese philosopher [Confucius] also played a role in chopsticks' rise to prominence, decrying the use of knives as violent, and something that should never happen at the dinner table." Wil Filton - Thrillist

And indeed, this is what yum cha is all about. Small morsels that you can pick up and put into your mouth with chopsticks. Well if you are proficient. But it seems to me that the disadvantage of this is that the food not only has to be small, but it also has to be dry. You can't eat sauce with chopsticks. Which is why you need rice - to soak up the sauce - when there is one. And which is why Chinese rice tends to be sticky so that you can eat clumps of it. I found one article that seemed to think it was more difficult to eat rice with a fork than chopsticks. I heartily disagree. And incidentally I noticed that the waiting staff of the restaurant cut the small portions into smaller portions, so that we would all get some, and this they did with scissors!

In the west meanwhile we persisted with hands initially, and then with the fork - mostly the two pronged version, and a knife to cut with. Which is what we traditionally use to this day. I was certainly brought up to eat with a knife and a fork - with the fork being the implement that carried the food to the mouth. When I started visiting France however, I found that just a fork was used pretty frequently. And I confess that these days I mostly eat with a fork. Unless I have a steak or something that needs cutting.

The Italians meanwhile are supposed to use a spoon and fork to eat spaghetti, though I'm not sure I've seen many of them doing this. I think they mostly use a fork.

But yes, a third of the world still eats with their hands.

It's not just the Indians. Throughout the Middle East hands are commonly used, in Africa too and in parts of South East Asia. And if we are honest we eat with our hands a lot too. Finger food is a term used to cover a whole range of things. How else can you eat a hamburger? Sandwiches of all kinds, tacos and wraps, the list is endless, toast and honey, cakes and muffins. And the snag in bread is a throwback to the middle ages trencher - meat plonked on a piece of old bread and eaten with the hands.

It takes skill to use all of these implements - even the hands. Looking at the picture above I wonder how all that sauce gets consumed. You would need a lot of rice or bread to soak it up. And what are all those flatbreads but giant spoons?

Which comes first though? The food or the implement? I think it must be the food. If your culture has developed a particular cuisine, then it also develops a particular way of eating it. Well sort of - because let's face it, most of us westerners eat curry with a fork - although maybe we do use the bread to scoop some up. And the French definitely use bread to wipe their plates clean of those lovely sauces. So it seems the hand has not lost its use as an eating implement. And Mongolia - I know so little about Mongolia, but I'm guessing they eat more meat and therefore need knife and fork.

And then there are all those specialist implements that have come and gone.

"A spork is a perfect metaphor for human existence. It tries to function as both spoon and fork, and because of this dual nature, it fails miserably at both. You cannot have soup with a spork; it is far too shallow. You cannot eat meat with a spork; the prongs are too small." Spork.org

Some of the specialist implements are more useful though - a fondue fork, a nutcracker, those things to tease out meat from shellfish...

And then there's the question of what to make them from - they're looking at the effect of different metals on the taste of food for example. And then there's the dreaded plastic cutlery - for safety on planes they say, though I personally think this is ridiculous. I'm sure you could do a fair bit of damage with a plastic fork - or anything else come to that - a pen for example. I notice that Emirates have not gone plastic, but then I guess they are an Islamic airline, so maybe they don't need to worry. But it's not just safety it's that awful disposable ethos that seems to persist in fast food outlets where most of the plastic cutlery is found.

So, as usual, I have just skimmed the surface of a topic that people have written books about, dedicated their lives to researching and obtained PhDs with. Yet again though it shows how people given the same problem solve it in so many different ways.

"Over the centuries the need to eat has led us to develop an astonishing plethora of niche skills and equipment, has made of eating itself a highly sophisticated act of pleasure as well as survival." Lucy Lethbridge - The Guardian