Spoons, forks, sporks, and knives

It's sunday, so that means its google day. As my fans know, I promised to blog about the history of utensils. Though i majored in history, I must confess that i'm no expert on culinary evolution (though i do love to eat lol). Frankly, my promise of fork blogging was just something that popped into my head at the time. But I'm a man of my word.

Full disclosure: I'm an unabashed spoon partisan. Whereas most people consider the fork the "go-to" utensil (I really have no idea, but it seems that way. If any tech-savy fans want to start a poll, i'd be interested in the results), I myself favor the spoon. Assuming the Veil of Ignorance (Jown Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 1971), meaning that I had to go through life with just one utensil, I would definetly choose a spoon. A spoon is so much better at scooping than a fork, and I think I get fuller bites when spoon-fed. Some argue that a fork brings more cutting prowess to the table (so to speak, lol!), but I think the shear (lol) number of spoon-centric meals in my diet (e.g., kitchens of india, soup, rice bowls) outweighs any cutting advantage of the fork. Besides, I can eat a pancake with a spoon, but I can't eat cereal with a fork. QED.

So anyway, im actually pretty interested in how the spoon, fork, and knife combo became the norm. As my twitheads know, i'm all about questioning norms and analyzing the geneology of accepted patterns of behavior. Some may think that forks, knives, and spoons are just inevietable, objectively necesary eating accessories, but I say "au contraire Pierre!" (i often assume my imaginary intellectual sparring partners are named Pierre). Look at the land of China--they use chopsticks. Now i'll grant that there are probably a limited number of utensil shape options for a bipedal species such as our own (i mean, obvi a tentical-centric species would have little use for our knives), but if the popularity (well, i should probably just say common usage, since popularity is a meaningless concept when there's not much choice involved) of our three utensil norm was merely a matter of utility, then the spork would be on every dinner table (whew, what a sentence lol).

In prehistoric times, cavemen used spears to kill their food, so it was only natural to use little tiny spears to pick at their food when eating. In these little tiny spears we see the origin of both chopsticks and forks. With the invention of stew (a pre-cursur to chunky soup), our ancestors had to come up with a new mechanism for moving morsels to mouths. Many cavemen were content to just schwangle their stew straight from the bucket, but this method tended to create major spills and make their caveman beards start to smell. Thus, the cavewives created the first ladle by tying a wicker basket to a stick.

The tiny spear and wicker ladle combonation was dominant until the Iron Age, when humans learned how to weld. Scientists have discovered proto-forks in the city Ur. Most importantly, metalworking allowed humans to finally create a usable spoon. Whereas the whicker basket and stick combination was allright for wooly mammoth stew, it didn't work so well for the lighter stews poplular in warm mesopotamia, e.g, gespacho. There were several advances in ladle technology (e.g., using dried mud to fill the holes in the wicker basket), but it was the ancient Greeks who revolutionized the soup-to-mouth trip. Pythagorus discovered that if one filled a wicker basket with metal and let it sit, it would form a non-porourous depression that one could fill with stew (and later, soup and kitchens of india). This invention caught on, and soon the spoon became a staple at fashionable Athenien tables.

The Greeks also invented the fork as we know it. As I mentioned before, scientists have discovered proto-forks in mesopotamia. These forks were essentially little daggers welded together. The Greeks looked to their God Neptune, who wielded a trident. They decided this would be a good model for the table, so they made little tiny tridents, which soon accompanied the spoon as a go-to combination.

The Romans essentially copied the Greeks, though they spread the spoon and fork combo across the Mediterranian basin. They also loved spaghetti, which could only be eaten with a good spoon/fork combo.

During the middle ages, people often just used dried up breadcrusts to cut their food. Then during the Victorian age some British twit invented the salad fork, which is just reduntant.

So that's basically how our utensils came to be. I advocate wider use of the spork, but for now, i'll just be thankful to that unknown genius cavewoman who first tied a wicker basket to a stick. Otherwise, we might all be trying to eat our kitchens of india with little spears.