By continuing you agree to eChinacities's Privacy Policy .
Sign up with Google
Sign up with Facebook
Q: Chopsticks -- why/how?
Let's go back thousands/million? years ago, human evolution, let's eat...
I'm sure the first instinct of human was to pick up the food with hands and bring it to the mouth - understandable!
Fast forward - Civilized society = eating with hands is dirty/burn hands so human started using spoon, fork, knife etc...
around same time in China (center of world) - some dude picked up two thin sticks and thought "I will eat eat my food with these/ it'll be fun to eat with these", it would be much more easier to take food to the mouth by using these sticks? how is this any easier?
P.s.. I don't have any problems using chopsticks (in fact I pretty skillful eating with those- so I've been told) but this question always bothered me a little...
whether, as scots says, there is significant room for improvement or not, chopsticks were not improved upon. i've only found them to be the best utensil for noodles and cake; everything else is best eaten with knife, spoon or fork.
they strain the hand, allow for little food to be picked up, and suffer from lots of food dropping. i see only 3 reasons why theycould possibly be kept in, and remain so widespread:
1) cultural superiority.
2) generations of copying; stick with the old try nothing foreign.
3) make it difficult for greedy people to stuff their faces with the shared dishes at the table. a substitute for self-moderation.
at lunch parties, i like to put bits of different dishes in my bowl at once. i don't see others doing this. is it the eternal fear of losing face that compels them to take sigle bites of dishes?
ScotsAlan:
Sorry coin, thick thumbs. downvote instead of up. There does indeed seem to be a general trend here that inefficiency is good. Now you have me thinking. Why no different sticks for different foods? In the west we have tea spoons, soup spoons, desert spoons, serving spoons, and sporks, the most recent development.
coineineagh:
i've made the same mistake before. sporks run counter to the development of more differentiated utensils.
I imagine it would have started with a single pointed stick being use to pick meat from shellfish etc, then developed into 2 pointy sticks.
Buy it it never evolved beyond 2 sticks, I have no idea. Maybe it came down to materials again. China had bamboo, which is pretty much a wonder material, They also had porcelain. In the west a few hundred years ago commoners had wooden bowls and bulky wooden spoons. It takes a lot of effort to make a clean straight stick from western trees. So western eating gear had lots of scope to be improved, so they improved it. But China saw no need to improve on bamboo chopsticks because they were easy to make, and cheap.
ScotsAlan:
Just to add, what does baffle me is the ceramic spoons. Why they are shaped as they are. They are the wrong shape for both picking up food with and eating food from.
ScotsAlan:
Yes. I suppose they are ok for slurping, and the solid stuff in the soup can be handled with sticks. But when I order fried rice, for example, it arrives with the same type of spoon for serving. And its useless for that.
I suppose when you have something free, plentiful and convenient why would you look for ways to change it?
whether, as scots says, there is significant room for improvement or not, chopsticks were not improved upon. i've only found them to be the best utensil for noodles and cake; everything else is best eaten with knife, spoon or fork.
they strain the hand, allow for little food to be picked up, and suffer from lots of food dropping. i see only 3 reasons why theycould possibly be kept in, and remain so widespread:
1) cultural superiority.
2) generations of copying; stick with the old try nothing foreign.
3) make it difficult for greedy people to stuff their faces with the shared dishes at the table. a substitute for self-moderation.
at lunch parties, i like to put bits of different dishes in my bowl at once. i don't see others doing this. is it the eternal fear of losing face that compels them to take sigle bites of dishes?
ScotsAlan:
Sorry coin, thick thumbs. downvote instead of up. There does indeed seem to be a general trend here that inefficiency is good. Now you have me thinking. Why no different sticks for different foods? In the west we have tea spoons, soup spoons, desert spoons, serving spoons, and sporks, the most recent development.
coineineagh:
i've made the same mistake before. sporks run counter to the development of more differentiated utensils.
I think that cooking styles and the way people eat probably evolved together.
Chinese generally don't cook things like steak or a roasted leg of pig, they cut things small and so are easily eaten with chopsticks and communally rather than individual portions. Maybe this was because they used chopsticks and it suited the chopsticks way of eating, or maybe because they liked to cook like that and chopsticks were the easiest and most convenient way to eat that food. Who knows.
.
I personally don't have any problems using them, in fact - depending what I cook - I often go with chopsticks over a knife and fork. I think given the way people cook and eat here chopsticks are a pretty effective way of eating.
I don't know what came first, the chopsticks or the cooking style but I think that once both were established in the culture it would be hard to change one without affecting the other. And they probably saw no need to.
ScotsAlan:
I agree. I did think about this, the cooking style suiting the use of chopsticks. Maybe it could be something as simple as the availabilty of material to make cutting tools. In the west we had lots of flint back in the stone age, and flint can easily be knapped to make a good cutting edge. It is also known that flint was transported all over Europe in trade. Maybe no flint in China. If westerners had flint pre Bronze age, it would follow they would use the discovery of metals to improve on what they used flint for. Just a thought.
Bit of an ethnocentric question. They use chopsticks because it is their culture to do so.
coineineagh:
that's a circular argument. let's break that circle: before the advent of modern cutlery, i assume it was my ancestors' culture to eat by hand. yet something changed- we recognized that the new utensils worked better. why can't China?
dokken:
A serious answer is that while a fork and knife are more efficient at gathering food, the Chinese are proud of their chopsticks, feel comfortable using them and like the tradition. Tradition is key here. The Chinese have been open to many aspects of western culture but you can't expect them to change things they like. I also think that by not using the shovel type instrument that is the fork, it keeps them skinnier
I dunno either,,, but u can get a damn good laugh hanging them out your nose!
thefidu881:
I gotta hide now...I press the up and it appears down...WTF!
Chinese are good at creating new things out of necessity but terrible at improving already existing things. This has failed them many times through history. When Japan was modernizing its army, China was sitting there watching and thinking "they can't possibly beat all of us". The current leadership however understands the importance of technological progress.
Stiggs is right, the Chinese started cutting their food into bite-sized portions which work well with chopsticks. That stuck, and so there was no need for anything else. You've never wondered why they don't serve steaks here? Why kung pao chicken has cubed chicken pieces? The food is designed for chopsticks. The food influenced the popularity of chopsticks.
BTW, forks have been found in ancient Chinese burial sites. They chose chopsticks over a fork, it's not that they couldn't think of using one.
A tad off topic....but Marco Polo never mentioned them. The big Italian bullshitter!
He probably just sat on the Black Sea and made most of it up from 2nd hand reports..
despite being an acute observer of daily life and rituals, there is no mention in Marco Polo’s chapters on China of the custom of binding women’s feet, chopsticks, tea drinking, or even the Great Wall.
Gee...how did he miss all that?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/8691111/Explorer-Marco-...
All good points above, but I want to add that their way of eating probably has a lot to do with it. Food is shared except for your bowl of rice and soup. There would be a lot more germ swapping if you had a fork going mouth to communal bowl. And with things like big soups where you are eating things out of the pot, you would never be able to get anything with a fork unless you ladled it into your bowl first.
Pretty good points, thanks! have a "thumbs up" for all... 
I think, since the Noddles is the nations most important/favorite food, and it's easy to eat noddles with chopstick then may be with fork, and that's why the chopsticks started being used for everything. I know, it still doesn't explain the rice. it is the least comfortable way to eat rice, and still the rice is a part of every meal...maybe we just need to THINK HARDER 
I think chopsticks are pretty awesome. Much easier to grab things with chopsticks than a fork.
