From:	Robert Watkins robert.watkins@******.com
Subject:	the value of education (OT-rant, long)
Date:	Thu, 15 Jul 1999 17:42:22 +1000

Arcady writes:
> Hmmm...
>
> You seem to have overlooked the presence of kitchen knives. Which have
> always been there and always been legal. Meat cleavers, vegetable cutting
> knives, and so on.

And you have overlooked the fact that a typical village had maybe three of
those between all the occupants, for most of China's history. Knives and
similar tools are made out of _metal_, and metal cost. Your typical dirt
poor villager didn't have much of it, and it would have been used where it
would have been of the most benefit.

> The Chopstick's history lies in it's simple intuitive
> design and usage.

Which pales in comparison to the knife and fork, the most intuitive and
easy-to-use eating tools ever designed since the fingers and teeth.

Consider the problem. Obviously, fire is needed, as the main point of eating
tools is to eat food that is too hot to comfortably hold. Fire (and cooking)
imply the availability of cutting utensils, as it is pretty hard to cook a
whole cow/chicken/typical meat animal at a time and eat it. So obviously
some sort of tool is available to cut the meat up.

The eating knife evolved from the dagger. Typically, in the west, most men
(and women, for that matter) possessed a belt knife at least. With two, you
can pin the food down while you cut it to eat it. Some bright spark came
along with the idea of giving the holding "knife" more than one point, and
you have the fork. Meanwhile, the knife you use to cut meat is evolving into
a shape better suited for that: the cleaver and carving knife. You can't
readily use a cleaver to eat your meal, but it's great for chopping it up
into easy to cook portions.

To evolve the chopstick, first you must have the knives taken away, probably
at a stage in the development where the eating knife is also the person's
main utility knife. A dagger is a weapon, and seen as such, even if it's
mainly used to cut bread. A cleaver isn't seen as a weapon, even though you
can use it as such.

So now you have a group of people who can still prepare food to cook, but
have no easy way of eating it while hot. They don't want it eat the food
raw, and they don't want it cold. They need some way of picking it up while
it's hot.

They probably tried to use sticks to spear the food (Remember, they can
still cut it up into cooking-size portions, so they cut it into bite-size
portions instead). Pretty awkward, though. Somebody starts to use two sticks
to pick it up with, as substitute fingers. After a lot of practise, the
chopstick is born.

It's also worth noting that spoons wouldn't have been invented or readily
available at this point in history. If they had, the eating method would
have become a spoon to hold the food, and a scraper to put the food onto it
(again, given bite-size pieces). This is essentially what the fork evolved
into: a spearing surface to allow food to be held while cutting (and to lift
bite size pieces), plus a flat surface to pick up collections of smaller
objects like a spoon would.

Chopsticks are bloody hard to learn. Anyone with a minimal amount of
dexterity can learn to use a knife and fork. Chopsticks take a lot of
practise.

{The above comments have been written by a person who has used chopsticks
regularly for the last 14 years)

--
.sig deleted to conserve electrons. robert.watkins@******.com