From:	Robert Watkins robert.watkins@******.com
Subject:	the value of education (OT-rant, long)
Date:	Fri, 16 Jul 1999 09:28:02 +1000

Arcady writes:
> Even in the poorest of regions there's two things nearly every
> Chinese family
> has almost always owned for the last few thousand years:
>
> An metal wok (iron or whatever was available) and a meat cleaver:
> a large square
> blade with a handle on one end.

These were not owned by single families. One was shared between extended
families and villages. Eating utensils are _personal_.

> >> 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.
>
> This is pure cultural eletism speaking. A chopstick is very much
> like an extended
> finger. A fork is like grabbing your food with a miniature pitchfork.

No, it's not... you can teach someone who has used chopsticks all their life
to use a knife and fork. They might _prefer_ chopsticks, but they know how
to use the knife and fork. The reverse is not true.

And a fork is not like grabbing your food. It is a device to spear it (a
concept people grasp easily) and hold it in place while you cut it.

> >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.
>
> To evolve the Chopstick all you had to do was realize that
> grabbing the food
> with your fingers is messy or sometimes painful when hot. So get
> longer fingers.
> Hey; there's a stick lying over there... End of discovery.

Messy doesn't count. Messy food only happens when a culture learns more
about cooking.

"Painful when hot" implies you can cook it, which implies you can cut it up,
which implies you already have a knife available for you. So you have a
knife at hand before you go looking for that stick over there (which is
covered with bark which probably doesn't taste nice, anyway).

> >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
>
> You've never been in a Chinese household and seen people eat have
> you? I have,
> I'm 1/4 Chinese on my father's side. I was raised with
> chopsticks. I then lived
> in Korea where the two tools used at the table are a spoon and chopsticks.

Yes. I have. A close friend of mine in high school was Chinese (and
culturally so), and I stayed at his place fairly often. And the spoon in
Chinese history was developed a lot later, AFTER the chopstick was set in
place. :)

Spoons are a very recent invention, comparatively.

Further more, I spent four years studying the Chinese language and culture.
I'm not speaking out of ignorance here.

> And people have always had knives. If not metal then stone, wood, or bone.

I said that they had knives originally. I also said that they had devices
classed as weapons (as the traditional eating knife would have been) taken
away.

Finally, the archaeological evidence for the description I gave is there:
primitive man in China had eating utensils similar to the knife and fork (a
general purpose knife, and a two-pronged mini-spear, basically), much like
primitive man in Europe and Africa. So they developed the knife and fork
_first_. Then, some 5,000 years ago, chopsticks entered the picture. Given
that chopsticks would not have displaced the knife and fork all that easily,
the logical conclusion to take is that someone banned the eating knife. And
banning of anything traditionally seen as a weapon was something undertaken
by virtually every Chinese regime (we know this thanks to the fact that
China's history is fairly well documented by the Chinese themselves).

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