I've just finished eating some noodles (OM NOM NOM) and I started to wonder: who here can competently use chopsticks? By competent I mean "can pick up a grain or two of rice with them" not "can spear a prawn onto one of them 30% of the time". I learnt to use them because I was too embarrassed to ask for a knife and fork at a Chinese restaurant a second time, and for a month solid I ate just about all my food with chopsticks - pasta, spaghetti (works well, for obvious reasons), curry, chilli con carne - and as a result, I can eat with chopsticks literally as eaily as I do a fork.

What about you lot, then? I'd imagine Shake is pretty good with them - he'd have to be. On that note, do they use metal chopsticks out there? I heard someone say they do, and that they're a real pain; if you're sweating at all from the heat, they slide right out your fingers!

Also, I wonder if anyone agrees with me that the whole world should convert to chopsticks. It's far more elegant than a knife and fork, production is far cheaper, and a set can be carried upon one's person as easily as you or I carry a pen. I mean - how awesome is it that you can get your cutlery by the hundred for about £10? Awesome.

tl;dr: chopsticks rule.

 

I am quite good with chopsticks, in that I can usually pick up just about anything with them. The metal ones do slip a bit, but I can still use them for most foods. Overall, I think that chopsticks are more cost effective, if you get a nice set. They are easy to clean, carry, and re-use.

Personally I think that everyone should learn to eat with chopsticks. Isn't there some study which shows a correlation between increased IQ scores and chopstick use?

 

I'm okay with chopsticks. I haven't used them in a long time. I think it's good to know how to use them if you're going to an authentic Asian restaurant, but otherwise it's kind of tedious.

Oh, and please, no more pompous IQ test correlations. Not to mention how unimportant an IQ test really is to begin with, or how it only shows one type of intelligence, if even, considering most of it is knowledge, not intelligence.

 

I don't eat much Asian food, so my experience with them is ... well ... minimal.

 

I am very good with chopsticks....I have bee using them since I was very young. My dad was stationed in Korea during the war/police action and when he came back our diet changed. Mostly oriental food and we HAD to use chopsticks. It helped me too since I am an awesome cook when it comes to a wok and stir fry. lol

 

I promise you, if you become really proficient at them, they're anything but tedious.

I mean, obviously, it's difficult to eat a steak with them, but then again, that a question of preparation.

and ancient_red, I've used metal ones in a Korean restaurant, and I found them ok, too - but I'll bet that they're a nightmare with sweaty fingers.

On that note, does anyone know how they get their rice so fluffy? What rice should I use? Should I steam it afterwards or what? I just can't seem to manage it.

 

Well that's what I mean. They're pretty tedious when it comes to the type of food that is most eaten in America(outside of very Latino/Asian/African cultures, etc). At the end of the day, you need to use a fork and knife to cut a steak, unless you want the person who cooks it to cut it up too.

It probably would do the US some good to serve/eat food more like Asian countries though. It's kind of hard to eat McDonald's with chopsticks.

 

I guess.

However, you can actually eat most Western food with chopsticks, so long as none of the 'chunks' are too large - and really, steak is about the only one you'd need to cut up much. Meat on the bone should fall off it anyway if it's properly cooked, well cooked fish should come apart easily too, so... there's really no excuse.

And MacDonalds is finger-food. No-one uses a knife and fork for that, do they?

 

i feel awkward if i use a fork and knife when in a chinese food restaurant even though i have to ask for the chopsticks. my friends think im weird but wtvr.

overall, i use chopsticks the whole time with the exception of rice and chicken balls. i dont have patience for those foods.

 

Hey man, I would've been the first to tell you that correlation doesn't equal causation. And yeah, some IQ tests aren't very good indicators of ability to reason, so much as ability to memorize and repeat.

However, reasoning is testable. Also, there is a strong correlation between IQ tests and level of academic success. That may or may not make someone better able to reason, but any person's ability to reason is only improved with greater knowledge. Anyway, that wasn't the point. The point was, I think there is a study out there, and it amused me.

 

ni hao

 

Well, it didn't take long!

Actually, aren't you Asian, partly, somehow, Incubus? If I recall right... what's your stance on them? Love them? Hate them? Do you, in fact, use them much at all, living in the US?

 

If everyone ate with chopsticks, and everyone ate food that was intended to be eaten with chopsticks, we'd all be a lot healthier. Partly because you tend to eat more slowly with them, and your stomach has a chance to signal to you that you don't really need or want to eat any more.

But as has been duly noted, you can't eat a steak of a hamburger with them. Or a bowl of soup, for that matter.

 

I like using chopsticks, but would prefer eating with my fingers...except for soup.

 

I don't know how they do it, but I buy rice at the Chinese store and cook it with a rice steemer. That way, it's fluffy.

 

its good to know how to eat with chopsticks because if yours break or you lose them you can use sticks from trees. or pencils.

 

Well, no, you can't eat soup.

What you can eat soup with, however, is those gorgeous soup spoons that the Japanese/Chinese use. How I love those things.

Dining in those cultures is so much more elegant and refined than in the West.

I'm glad you showed up, Kimiko, because I wanted to ask: I'm not sure whether you ever said whether you were born in the Far East and moved to the States, or were born in the States... I'm going to guess the latter, since you're an English teacher, so - how much food from the Far East did you eat as a child, and how much do you still eat now? Is your diet Westernised, or does it retain much of your cultural heritage?

You meantion a health issue. Why is it, do you think, that the Japanese/Chinese - especially the Japanese - have such a high life expectancy? I mean - it's clearly from their diets, but why is it that, as a culture, they evolved such a healthy style of preparing and eating their food?

 

Actually, all widely used IQ tests are horrible indicators of anything but knowledge. Yes, reasoning is testable, but by the time you test it, you're mostly testing knowledge. And Academic success just means that you have good habits or enough of a memory to regurgitate what you've been taught. If you want to test ability to reason, present people with problems that they can't read about in a textbook or be taught how to solve, and tell them to solve them, or similar things like that where you can't learn them or be taught them, you just have to have the ability to naturally. I put more stock in an original essay than an IQ test anyday.


And orion, the McDonald's joke was a way of implying that if people have to eat food that is prepared in portions and use utensils that don't allow you to eat like a pig so easily, they won't.

 

This is false. High-class univeristy establishments (Harvard, Yale, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, St Andrews, Glasgow, and many other places) teach you how to think and reason. The emphasis is not on regurgitation, but application of knowledge.

Community college may be different - it clearly is. But I think you'll find that if you ever go to an excellent university, the exam questions are often on problems you've never before encountered. You are there to learn to apply, not just to learn.

Sorry. You're wrong.

 

I already had that at high school.