Can You Eat With Chopsticks?

[Nanohedron]

How do Mexicans eat rice and beans when they're not wrapped in something?

It's called a fork.

[brewerpaul]

My grandfather was an importer who traveled to the East on long trading trips back in the pre- and post WWII periods, up into the early '60s. He always brought cool stuff back for my sister and me and when I was in elementary school he brought us chopsticks. Showed us how to use them too. I remember making myself obnoxious in the cafeteria eating spaghetti with them

[Nanohedron]

I've seen bored Japanese students working at picking up slippery things like ice cubes out of their drinks with chopsticks, for example, just because. I can assure you that ice cubes are quite the challenge. Good practice, though.

[I.D.10-t]

One thing I have always disliked about chopsticks is the name. Always seemed like a strange renaming. I suppose if they were "discovered" now they would be called X-treme Speed Sticks, probably marketed marketed with an image with someone holding them in an X within an extended fist.

[dwest]

Around these parts we call 'em hashi, bit of family joke actually, my uncle's surname is Hashimoto. If you spend much time around canoe builders you'll eventually hear about Shuhei Ogawara's chopstick canoe.

[mutepointe]

One thing I have always disliked about chopsticks is the name.

Maybe it's that piano piece that ruined the name chopsticks.

[dwest]

One thing I have always disliked about chopsticks is the name.

Maybe it's that piano piece that ruined the name chopsticks.

That was written by Frédéric Chopin when he was having that affair with that French guy, writer George Sand.

[Redwolf]

I learned to eat with chopsticks kind of by accident.

We loved a local Chinese place. A lot. As I was struggling with my weight (still am, but that's another story), I decided that forcing myself to eat with chopsticks would slow me down and make me eat less.

Didn't work. I just got good with chopsticks!

Redwolf

[brianholton]

So why 'chopsticks'? I always assumed that in the mid-19th century when Europeans started going to China en masse (i.e. after the opium Wars), English slang for food was 'chop', because chops (pork, mutton) were so popular.

But my dictionary says it's China Coast Pidgin English, from 'chop-chop', meaning 'quickly' in Cantonese. In Mandarin Chinese they're called Kuaizi, related to kuai, 'quick' - it's a recently-coined word, maybe no more than 2-300 years old - the classical language uses a different word altogether.

And sticking them in the rice is unlucky, because it looks like the incense sticks that are stuck in offerings of rice (e.g. at funerals).

[emmline]

I doubt if the English speaking world will willingly make a shift to using the terms hashi or otemoto, but you can use those words if you don't like saying chopsticks. The fact that most people won't know what you're talking about notwithstanding.

Otemoto, btw, is what it might say on your chopsticks wrapper. Only it will look like this: おてもと。

[Nanohedron]

I would say that this is probably bad manners:



Feeding your pet with chopsticks. I mean, seriously. Particularly if you're using them yourself in the meantime. Besides, Miss Manners will tell you that anyone who has cats knows that Purrball will far prefer the proper cat-etiquette of scarfing up his treat from the floor.

[dwest]

I doubt if the English speaking world will willingly make a shift to using the terms hashi or otemoto, but you can use those words if you don't like saying chopsticks. The fact that most people won't know what you're talking about notwithstanding.

Otemoto, btw, is what it might say on your chopsticks wrapper. Only it will look like this: おてもと。

Some good 5.5mm bamboo knitting needles'll work just as well....when I hear people say hashi 箸 I always say "bless you"

[dwest]

I would say that this is probably bad manners:



Feeding your pet with chopsticks. I mean, seriously. Particularly if you're using them yourself in the meantime. Besides, Miss Manners will tell you that anyone who has cats knows that Purrball will far prefer the proper cat-etiquette of scarfing up his treat from the floor.

Dogs are adept at eating from chopsticks however in a number of cultures dogs are eaten with chopsticks.

[Nanohedron]

And sticking them in the rice is unlucky, because it looks like the incense sticks that are stuck in offerings of rice (e.g. at funerals).

Yeah, you see this explanation floating around, but I wonder if it isn't Chinese or something, because as Emm already mentioned earlier, the traditional Japanese funeral food offering for the departed is in fact a bowl of rice with actual chopsticks (often the deceased's personal pair) stuck upright in it. Sometimes it's only one chopstick.

Searching around I came across the assertion that the chopsticks-stuck-in-the-rice thing doesn't even have any meaning in China, as eat-and-go shops serve up rice to you that way. Dunno if it's true, or if it is, whether it's universal. China's a pretty big country, and culturally heterogenous. But it makes me imagine Japanese tourists steeling themselves for the ghastliness of what they must surely know to expect!

When I was in Japan, my Wajin buds and I would hang out at the local izakaya. One evening the youngest member of our group offered to get one of the older ones a refill bowl of motsunikomi (a spicy chunky stew with chicken guts for the meat; actually enormously delicious). Now, while attending to one's seniors is traditional, warmhearted, and shining manners for a subordinate, that sort of attentiveness was also a bit unusually formal among us (we being easygoing dogs), and being as yer man was the group clown, I knew him well enough to be on the alert for something brilliant, and I was right: it was all a windup. He comes back, unceremoniously sets the bowl down in front of Nabe-kun, and swiftly chunks the chopsticks upright into the midst of the stew. Just like that. Total, total insult to one of the best-loved among us, and everyone, including me, gasped audibly and went pale. And there he was, laughing at us. We weren't far behind. It was hilarious. But you can't pull off an intentional gaffe like that as a practical joke unless everyone is pretty darned close.

So the moral is: it doesn't even have to be rice for the manners issue to apply.

[I.D.10-t]

The funny thing is that I would have never considered inserting sticks vertically into rice if it wasn't for all of the number of times I have read/heard "don't do it". I don't stick my knife or fork vertically into steak or mash potatoes, and I wouldn't do it in rice (would a fork in rice also be considered rude?). Like the Chinese rice thing, about the only time I can think of this happening is rarely at a small ice cream stand with spoons or some other quick stop place. Again, some cultural differences pop up with what to do with utensils not in hand, but it kind of seems like on the level of saying "don't stick your hashi behind your ear or hold them under your arm".

The one rule that I have read that I will break is rubbing two of the disposable sticks together. I swear, some restaurants put more thought into what kind of advertising is on the wrapper rather than the quality of the device inside. If the sticks have splinters, I'm not going to make a production of it, but I will take care of them. Odd thing is that I see this less at the Cheap restaurants that use bulk, often bamboo chopsticks.

Here are some additional rules I have seen printed on the wrappers.