STI·CKS "ONCE YOU LEARN YOU'LL NEVER GO BACK.'.',

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~ ? / ... FIRST. CHOPSTICKS ARE OLDER.

Though an exact date cannot be put on the first time a young

Chinese girl pulled twigs off a branch and used them to

pluck food from a large firepot, it is thought to have been

around five\thousand years ago (not long before Noah

started building his ark l)' In order to conserve fuel, early

Chinese cooks chopped their ingredients into itty-bitty

pieces so that they would cook more quickly. The tradition

continues today-you don't see many whole chickens or

ducks or slabs of beef coming out of the Mandarin Garden

kitchen. What better tool to pick up each cubed morsel than

a pair of thin splints? Chinese chopsticks are called kuaizi,

~ which means "quick little fellows." Quick little fellows l

After years of slicing open their lips on the nubs that

lined the twigs, ancient cooks eventually winnowed them

down into two smooth. slender sticks. By then (around

the 5th century BCI the rice sweepers found an ally in that

gentle giant Confucius Ihim againJ. who as a vegetarian

and animal lover believed knives to be savage reminders of

slaughter-Iar too uncouth for the dinner table .

In his book on semiotics, Empire of Signs, the French

scholar Roland Barthes argued that chopsticks suggested a

cultural divergence that went beyond mere manners. He de­

scribed the delicate movement of chopsticks as "maternal­

and opposed to the "predatory" instinct of Western cutlery.

"The chopsticks are the converse of our knile: they are the

alimentary instrument which refuses to cut, to pierce. to

mutilate, to riP'" he wrote "By chopsticks. food becomes

no longer a prey to which one does violence, but a

substance harmoniously translerred."

Those seeking a more hermeneutical

explanation might pair the decline of the knife

with that of the feudal warrior class, and the rise

of the chopstick with that of the scholarly gentry.

David Graeber points out that the intellectual elites

brought with them different manners, inspired by

Confucius lagainll, whose vegetarianism led him to

believe-long before any French philosopher alighted

on the idea-that knives encouraged men in the direction 01

the barbarism of the slaughterhouse.

At European tables. diners used knives and spoons

(when lingers wouldn 't do). Because metalworking was

expensive, Europeans brought their own cutlery to public

mess halls-usually their personal daggers. With ready

weapons and sufficient quantities of mead, violent outbursts

were common.

Once Confucius had blessed the use of chopsticks, they

spread from China to neighboring countries such as Korea,

Vietnam. and Japan, In Japanese chopsticks are called hashi,

which means bridge, We do not know the significance of this.

IPerhaps it referred to the one thing the Japanese and the

Chinese could agree upon.! The Japanese, fond of eating

with their hands, originally used the implements to wave

around in religious ceremonies, like wands. But the sticks

caught on, and Japan now imports from China 96 percent of

the 25.7 billion single-use "bridges" its citizens throwaway

each year. China itself discards more than 45 billion pairs, or

25 million trees' worth, Once upon a time the ruling classes

refused to eat with chopsticks made of anything but silver,

since it was believed that the metal would turn black upon

contact with poison. II only the superstition had endured,

the nation would be in much better shape environmentally.

In 2001, environmentalists warned that if the current rate of

timber use for chopstick production continues, the mainland

will clear-cut its remaining forests in about a decade.

Any attempt to phase out or even limit chopstick

use is bound to meet with strong emotional opposition.

The utensils are believed to improve memory, increase"

finger dexterity, and even allow us to pay more atten- . .

tion to our food. Don't laugh. Eating with a fork is ..""

mindless: Just stab and lilt. It can be done while !I'/ "" reading or watching TV. But if r you're picking up

bits of food with

wooden tongs, you have to pay

more attention as the food moves from bowl to

mouth. You have to oversee the progress, which brings a

kind of mindfulness that's missing from the Western meaL

Ironic. then, that the English chops lick should have its

roots in a perversion of the Chinese "quick little fellows ..'

by nineteenth-century British traders and journeymen, who

replaced that translated phrase with their own slang for

"hurry up"- "chop ChOpl"

~ Chopsticks should be held in the right hand, even by

[smarter, but more endangered by mishaplleft-handers . In

East Asia, as in Muslim nations, the left hand is designated

for the toilet, the right hand for eating. Though left-handed

eating has become more common [many restaurants make

antibacterial soap available in their bathrooms!' ancient

. Chinese traditions die hard .

T The sticks should encounter minimal contact with the

mouth. It is poor table manners to suck on the tip of chop­

sticks.

~ Use serving spoons to get the food to your bowl before

using your chopsticks. [Note, however, that in China it's not

unusual to use your own pair to serve yourself, an often

alarming custom to those not familiar with it.!

"}-- After you have picked up an item, it belongs to you.

No backs.

"}-- Never rest chopsticks by standing them up in a bowl

of rice. It's lazy, for one, and it's considered morbid, as it

resembles a funereal tradition in which food is offered to

the deceased.

THE CHINESE WAY

T Dishes are usually prepared to consist of bite-sized,

pieces. If an item is too big or too small to be picked up, it

is not intended to be eaten with chopsticks, but rather with a

spoon. So logical!

"':'- The rice bowl is raised to the mouth , and the rice

shoveled in using the chopsticks as a kind of forklift (bad

pun, sorryl. If rice is served on a plate, as is more common

in the West, it is acceptable to negotiate it with a fork or

spoon. Tweezing the rice grain by grain, for the chopstick­

challenged Westerner, is akin to playing Operation with

your food.

~ Having got all that wand waving out of their system early

on, the Japanese decided that sticks should be used for eat­

ing and nothing else.

1. Do not point or gesture with chopsticks, and do not use

them as drumsticks, no matter how hooky the song .

2. Do no~ oig arcund in the bowl for choice bits of food. Eat

from l' e top and identify what you're going for before

diggi ng in .

3. Neve~ stab or perce food with chopsticks.

4. 00 not move c;s"es around with chopsticks. They are not

mean! to 00 :,eavy ift ing.

5. Do no t lick or SJck U12 ends of chopsticks-it's rude.

6. Do not ~ et :ood drop orf the ends of chopsticks.

7. Do not shcve, fa d into your mouth with chopsticks like

the Chinese. In J2pan. :10 vessels, with the exception of

soup or tea bowls , are raised to the mouth .

8. Never use chopsticks to trcnsfer iood to someone else's

chopsticks, plate, or bowl. How unsanitary'

9. Place the pOinted ends of the utensils on a chopstick rest

when they are not in use.

'Y- The thin, slippery surface of the metal chopsticks com­

monly used in Korea makes speed eating challenging, so

Koreans tend to use a spoon for their rice and soup, and

chopsticks for everything else.

"J'-- Though they battled the Chinese for decades, the Viet­

namese eat the same way-lifting the rice bowl t'o the mouth

and shoveling the food in with the sticks. Vietnamese rice is

very sticky, making this a tidier ordeal than it might sound.