I know a bit about what is going on here. My wife is from Asia and they have some odd table manners there. A big one is how you eat your food. Now I was brought up thinking that my fork was the primary weapon of choice when attacking a meal. I mean, what’s better than a fork for stabbing at steak and potatoes, right? My spoon was for whatever was too fine to impale or scoop up with the tines of the fork, stuff like Jello and soup. Well it turns out that other places have something against the fork as the number one go to utensil. The spoon has surpassed the fork in usefulness in these cultures all together. If food needs to go anywhere near your mouth, you use the Spoon. The poor fork has been relegated to the lowly task of loading food into the spoon and to stab at the occasional tidbit that is too far away to safely scoop into the bowl of the spoon. What a sad time it is for the fork in these far off lands. And then there is the knife, don’t get me started on the knife. In these parts, your knife has but for one purpose in it’s life: to cut. That’s it. Never is it to be used to push, prod, or otherwise assist the food onto or into anything else.
Did I mention that the inhabitants of these places are rather steadfast in their utensil beliefs? Oh yeah, to the point of having the knife ripped from your hand and replaced with the spoon and then being told that you eat with said spoon. It’s like some strange form of brainwashing once you get ‘in country’. I wasn’t prepared for it at all. My wife’s family appeared to be sane enough but when it came to dinner time they all ganged up on me as if I had been eating peas with my knife at a state dinner! After trying to tell them and giving repeated demonstrations of my proficiency at feeding myself with a fork, I realized that as people say, ‘you can’t fight city hall’. True enough, once I gave up this silly notion my fork being a main force tool, things got better. After a while they stopped pointing and staring at me while I ate. Nothing like feeding time at the monkey house I suppose, but it’s not so much fun once they learn table manners.
Sometimes I miss my fork…
[via Simply Dumb]
