Honestly for a lot of foods they're really not a bad choice. They're excellent for eating flavored chips when you dont want powder on your fingers, also grabbing things from jars
I've gotta find someone with a 3D printer locally who can make me those fingy chopsticks for cheetos. I'm tired of cleaning my keyboard everytime I wanna snacc.
Please do not eat food served via a 3d printed tool/plate/bowl/cup. A number of the materials that are used for 3d printing are toxic (cross contamination is likely even if the material has been changed), and the plastic can contain small abrasion which are impossible to sanitize.
the plastic can contain small abrasion which are impossible to sanitize
That's putting it mildly - every 3D print has tons of small crevices and imperfections even just from the layer lines alone, it's just completely impossible to keep a 3D print clean between repeated food contact. Unless it's sealed with resin or similar, but that's also not easy to get right.
Get outta here Popeyes. Your tines are too short to grab the meat, and your ends are too pointy to gather the last 5%. I'd end up full of styrofoam, pawing at a bone like a kitten if I used you. My fingers and teeth work 100x better than you.
Even if I'm backpacking and I need to save weight, I'd rather have a cat-dog version of spoon and fork.
i use what's most convenient to grab... for instance i use a spoon, or even a fork, for making a pb&j far more often than a knife. there's a better chance of those being out on the drying rack than a knife. if that means i'm eating ice cream with a fork, i'm eating ice cream with a fork - as long as it's frozen enough.
Some fun chopstick facts: most chopsticks in the world (including China) are made in Georgia (the US state, not the country) because of the ready availability of cheap pine. One of the major reasons pine is so prevalent in Georgia (and in the US South in general) is slavery: cotton plantations in the pre-artificial fertilizer era tended to exhaust the soil after a few years, leaving pine trees as the only profitable crop that can be grown on much of the land.
Cotton is a destructive demanding crop. The post industrial era cotton farming has left swaths of land poisoned with arsenic and all sorts of nasties (chicken concentration camps are bad for arsenic too.)
(chicken concentration camps are bad for arsenic too.)
This is caused by roxarsone in chicken feed. I think they stopped using it several years ago, but I'd expect that this has caused lasting damage in some places.
Anywhere you have trees there are chopsticks. The only time I use them is when I don't have silverware in the wilds, either the wilds of the woods or the wilds of the endless wastelands of the automobile lands. Break off a couple twigs.
Depends on the rice, sticky rice is really easy to eat with chop sticks, you can just generally grab anything and get a chunk. Medium sticky you can scoop up but non sticky/liquid sauce is a non-starter.
The thing people forget is that the bowl is part of the cutlery.
It's why the bowl is so small. You pick it up!
Shovel that rice into your mouth like a pro chopstick user my friend. Stupid western table manners be damned!
(I'm from a western country, I also dislike the silly rule that you can't bring your face down to your plate/bowl if you're eating something hard to pick up)
I live in Hawaiʻi. We use chopsticks all the time. Itʻs just... what you do.
Whenever we get takeout and they give us forks instead of chopsticks, my wife and I refer to it as "getting haloeʻd" (for those who donʻt know, "haole" is a Hawaiian term for foreigner that tends be used exclusively for Caucasian people). Thereʻs a general assumption that most whites donʻt know how to use chopsticks. Related, I was once at a Japanese funeral, eating poke and sashimi with chopsticks, and this sweet lady comes up to me and says "you use those so well!" It felt like the white-person version of "youʻre so well-spoken!"
I stopped for dinner once at a Chinese restaurant in Mississippi run by people actually from China. I (white guy) used chopsticks and our server just stared at me wide-eyed for most of the meal. She said I was the first white person she had ever seen using them, and she'd been working there for years. That is Mississippi for you.
I didn't have the heart to tell her I'd learned to use them eating at Japanese restaurants.
Chopsticks are the best utensils for eating chips(crisps in England). I love eating chips but i also love being on my computer. Why get chipdust everywhere when you can be clean?
Chopsticks are great for all kinds of foods. It helps you slow down if you are a fast eater allowing yourself to feel full quicker and eat less. Its helped me lose weight. Also helps when eating popcorn as you eat small bites and don't get your hands dirty.
I like the Emma Thompson story about why she rolls her own cigarettes. The original idea was that if she had to roll her own cigarettes, she would slow down and smoke less. Ultimately, all that it accomplished was to teach her how to roll faster. So now she smoke just as much, but unfiltered.
This is my experience with chopsticks. At this point they don't slow me down, and I'm good enough that I can pick individual sesame seeds off of a plate with ease.
For me, the green part is: Because I used them while cooking and don't want to get anything else dirty.
I'm still adjusting to them for eating (should probably cut/choose my veggies, noodles etc. to rather be long+thin). But for cooking, I do find them quite good.
I can use wooden chopsticks in my non-stick pan. And they're really useful for stirring food, as you can just hold them close together (or use a single stick), when the food is prone to spilling.
I don't yet have the dexterity to always successfully flip foods in my frying pan with chopsticks, but it's not like I have that with other utensils. Whether chopsticks, spatula or fork, it's always a fiddly bugger.
I don't understand chinese restaurants that will cut broccoli and the like into unmanageable pieces, too big for a bite. Idk if it's cultural or a scheme of the all you can eat buffets to lessen the ability to shovel food into your mouth so quickly. Didn't work on me, all you can eat buffets are a mission for me to make them lose money.
I can't speak to Chinese Chinese, but a lot of east Asia cuts things into pieces one can pick up with chopsticks and eat in one bite. I haven't been to a US Chinese buffet in years, but I don't recall overly-large pieces the last time I went. Where I grew up (rural Ohio) not many people used chopsticks I til fairly recently, so maybe I'm forgetting my younger days or perhaps something else is going on.
I avoid the chopstick places because I could never master them and I was tired of feeling like an ignorant buffoon. The surprise was, after more than 5 years of avoiding the chopstick places, I still felt like an ignorant buffoon.
Why I use "chopsticks" is because I am on the go with no silverware and breaking off two sticks and using them to move food into my mouth is the best option.
Same, I never got good at chopsticks in college and early 20s when I was trying to act cool. By the end of a meal my hand always had something akin to writer's cramp. At some point I gave up and went back to forks. And sushi of course is finger food.
117 replies
Honestly for a lot of foods they're really not a bad choice. They're excellent for eating flavored chips when you dont want powder on your fingers, also grabbing things from jars
Chop sticks and Cheetos are a classic combo!
Teaching my Cheetos loving children how to use chopsticks has saved all my gaming controllers.
I use them for eating popcorn
But then you can't shovel handfuls of popcorn in your mouth where a quarter misses your mouth and is found in the couch cushions 2 days later.
Just saving some for later.
Gotta feed the roach homies
Aren't those the people who come over and empty your ashtrays when they're out of weed?
They are the best choice for salads. Eating salads with a fork sucks
I've gotta find someone with a 3D printer locally who can make me those fingy chopsticks for cheetos. I'm tired of cleaning my keyboard everytime I wanna snacc.
Check your public library, nowadays many often have a couple for the public to use
When I was in Toronto, yeppers. Alas I'm on an island out in the middle of nowhere. I'm gonna have to find a 3D print shop or make a friend lol
It's nice to hear from you again, and to be reminded of your living situation somewhere near Trailer Park Boys and Man in a Motel
Please do not eat food served via a 3d printed tool/plate/bowl/cup. A number of the materials that are used for 3d printing are toxic (cross contamination is likely even if the material has been changed), and the plastic can contain small abrasion which are impossible to sanitize.
That's putting it mildly - every 3D print has tons of small crevices and imperfections even just from the layer lines alone, it's just completely impossible to keep a 3D print clean between repeated food contact. Unless it's sealed with resin or similar, but that's also not easy to get right.
This is a big reason why I don't like plastic dishware, cups, etc even when they are made with food-safe materials.
my god grabbing things from jars how has that never occurred to me
Who else goes through spoons quicker than any other utensils? In my household
Long spoon. I love long spoon.
I can hear this image
That spoon in too big.
We call them Korean fighting spoons. Since it's for reaching side dishes and sauces before others at the table
Found the backpacker.
I bought a few sundae spoons at a thrift store on a lark and holy crap are they useful!
Little spoons go first for me,. But yes, spoons are the ultimate utensil
Spork enters the chat.
Get outta here Popeyes. Your tines are too short to grab the meat, and your ends are too pointy to gather the last 5%. I'd end up full of styrofoam, pawing at a bone like a kitten if I used you. My fingers and teeth work 100x better than you.
Even if I'm backpacking and I need to save weight, I'd rather have a cat-dog version of spoon and fork.
Splayd
I keep sporks in my car so if i'm starving after a shopping trip I can break into some grub.
I have a lot of condiments to scoop
i use what's most convenient to grab... for instance i use a spoon, or even a fork, for making a pb&j far more often than a knife. there's a better chance of those being out on the drying rack than a knife. if that means i'm eating ice cream with a fork, i'm eating ice cream with a fork - as long as it's frozen enough.
Whatever falls into the sarlacc pit that is my garbage disposal goes first
Little spoons - by a large margin
Forks
Big spoons
Kitchen knives
Butter knives
/I don't use chopsticks
Depends on what I made that week. If it's a soup or stew, spoons are the first to go.
Yes, but
Some fun chopstick facts: most chopsticks in the world (including China) are made in Georgia (the US state, not the country) because of the ready availability of cheap pine. One of the major reasons pine is so prevalent in Georgia (and in the US South in general) is slavery: cotton plantations in the pre-artificial fertilizer era tended to exhaust the soil after a few years, leaving pine trees as the only profitable crop that can be grown on much of the land.
Cotton is a destructive demanding crop. The post industrial era cotton farming has left swaths of land poisoned with arsenic and all sorts of nasties (chicken concentration camps are bad for arsenic too.)
This is caused by roxarsone in chicken feed. I think they stopped using it several years ago, but I'd expect that this has caused lasting damage in some places.
Anywhere you have trees there are chopsticks. The only time I use them is when I don't have silverware in the wilds, either the wilds of the woods or the wilds of the endless wastelands of the automobile lands. Break off a couple twigs.
There are foods that just don't hit the same if you don't eat them with chopsticks.
Ever tried to eat sushi with a fork? It just feels wrong.
But if it's a rice bowl, screw the chopsticks. Gimme a spoon.
I firmly believe sushi should be eaten with hands.
Japanese sushi chefs agree. Sushi is a finger food.
Makes sense. A chef’s hands touched 80% of that piece of Nigiri while making it
Can't use chopsticks, eh?
It’s how it’s eaten. Usually.
I highly suggest cooking and eating eggs with them!
Depends on the rice, sticky rice is really easy to eat with chop sticks, you can just generally grab anything and get a chunk. Medium sticky you can scoop up but non sticky/liquid sauce is a non-starter.
I eat sushi with a fork at least once a week
I used to eat sushi with a fork and it is possible. But that's really about the only food that's easier to eat with chopsticks than fork and knife.
Spaghetti with a fork fesls wrong
Spaghetti with everything feels wrong. The form factor is simply bad. It's not like a garden hose, where you need it to be that long.
It's not my least favorite, but it's a bit down the list. Penne is probably the best general purpose shape, at least according to these guys: https://www.realsimple.com/we-asked-chefs-which-pasta-shape-works-best-in-any-dish-11849324
I'm a fan of rotelle and fiori as well.
I prefer Vesuvio and Cavatappi
Both fine choices, they are on the upper end of the scale for me as well.
Nah it's noodles, chopsticks just feel right with it.
Just break it up before you cook it.
I do, when I cook it :) still prefer more complicated geometry
Yeah it is much better when you suck them in one by one through a drinking straw
The thing people forget is that the bowl is part of the cutlery.
It's why the bowl is so small. You pick it up!
Shovel that rice into your mouth like a pro chopstick user my friend. Stupid western table manners be damned!
(I'm from a western country, I also dislike the silly rule that you can't bring your face down to your plate/bowl if you're eating something hard to pick up)
Sticking a fork in sushi feels illegal.
Only in Japan. It's punishable by death.
In Japan you eat sushi with your hands
OMG that took me WAY longer than it should to realize it was a joke. All the way up to the soy sauce I thought it was just stuffy and serious.
I use it like a spatula :)
i don't mind
I live in Hawaiʻi. We use chopsticks all the time. Itʻs just... what you do.
Whenever we get takeout and they give us forks instead of chopsticks, my wife and I refer to it as "getting haloeʻd" (for those who donʻt know, "haole" is a Hawaiian term for foreigner that tends be used exclusively for Caucasian people). Thereʻs a general assumption that most whites donʻt know how to use chopsticks. Related, I was once at a Japanese funeral, eating poke and sashimi with chopsticks, and this sweet lady comes up to me and says "you use those so well!" It felt like the white-person version of "youʻre so well-spoken!"
I stopped for dinner once at a Chinese restaurant in Mississippi run by people actually from China. I (white guy) used chopsticks and our server just stared at me wide-eyed for most of the meal. She said I was the first white person she had ever seen using them, and she'd been working there for years. That is Mississippi for you.
I didn't have the heart to tell her I'd learned to use them eating at Japanese restaurants.
Chopsticks are the best utensils for eating chips(crisps in England). I love eating chips but i also love being on my computer. Why get chipdust everywhere when you can be clean?
I use it them when I douse cheetos with valentina. Two of the most finger stainingest foods known at this point in history.
It's like ambrosia for those of us awaiting cardiac release.
Your crisps have dust? How old are they?
I don't because i use chopsticks
I use them for pretty much everything because they’re marginally quicker to clean thoroughly than a fork
Plus it's fun.
Once you learn to eat rice with chopsticks you become unstoppable.
*for sticky rice (other rice is impractical)
Idk man I can eat fried rice pretty well with chopsticks.
One grain at a time
Because they are easier to handwash
But i don't wash anything in a restaurant :(
Not markedly easier though
The sure way for me to appear to be an amateur chopstick user is to use them.
Chopsticks are great for all kinds of foods. It helps you slow down if you are a fast eater allowing yourself to feel full quicker and eat less. Its helped me lose weight. Also helps when eating popcorn as you eat small bites and don't get your hands dirty.
I like the Emma Thompson story about why she rolls her own cigarettes. The original idea was that if she had to roll her own cigarettes, she would slow down and smoke less. Ultimately, all that it accomplished was to teach her how to roll faster. So now she smoke just as much, but unfiltered.
This is my experience with chopsticks. At this point they don't slow me down, and I'm good enough that I can pick individual sesame seeds off of a plate with ease.
When I'm hungry at an Asian restaurant I eat faster than fork/knife people with chop sticks.
For frying certain things they're very useful for flipping or grabbing.
3rd reason: because it's fun.
I find it just fun to eat with them. In the end, it doesn't matter as much how you are delivering food to your feeding hole.
For me, the green part is: Because I used them while cooking and don't want to get anything else dirty.
I'm still adjusting to them for eating (should probably cut/choose my veggies, noodles etc. to rather be long+thin). But for cooking, I do find them quite good.
I can use wooden chopsticks in my non-stick pan. And they're really useful for stirring food, as you can just hold them close together (or use a single stick), when the food is prone to spilling.
I don't yet have the dexterity to always successfully flip foods in my frying pan with chopsticks, but it's not like I have that with other utensils. Whether chopsticks, spatula or fork, it's always a fiddly bugger.
I've had the most success using tongs with flat ends. Dexterity aside, the small grip surface of a chopstick could damage the item being flipped.
I'd rather eat sushi with my hands than with a fork XD
cooking an omelette with chopsticks is a superior experience.
If you do your hair up with 2 forks you look like a dumb dumb whereas if you use chopsticks you look like somebody who saw a life hack video or post
Joke's on you I look like even more of an amateur when I use chopsticks
Soup - drink from bowl and use chopsticks if it has bits
Big soupy thing (ramen, pho, that sort) - spoon and chopsticks
Rice with grains that don't stick together much - spoon
Things like ice cream (dish), applesauce, that sort of consistency: spoon
Food from countries/places that don't cut things down to bite size: knife + fork (sometimes replaced by chopsticks when cutting is done)
Most other non-liquids: chopsticks or no utensil depending upon the case.
~ Person in Japan for over a decade
I don't understand chinese restaurants that will cut broccoli and the like into unmanageable pieces, too big for a bite. Idk if it's cultural or a scheme of the all you can eat buffets to lessen the ability to shovel food into your mouth so quickly. Didn't work on me, all you can eat buffets are a mission for me to make them lose money.
I can't speak to Chinese Chinese, but a lot of east Asia cuts things into pieces one can pick up with chopsticks and eat in one bite. I haven't been to a US Chinese buffet in years, but I don't recall overly-large pieces the last time I went. Where I grew up (rural Ohio) not many people used chopsticks I til fairly recently, so maybe I'm forgetting my younger days or perhaps something else is going on.
Because they are fun and feel appropriate when they are used?
I use them everywhere because it annoys my wife, but now I just like them
I always eat my cheetos with chopsticks. That way I don't get degenerate fingers.
I avoid the chopstick places because I could never master them and I was tired of feeling like an ignorant buffoon. The surprise was, after more than 5 years of avoiding the chopstick places, I still felt like an ignorant buffoon.
Why I use "chopsticks" is because I am on the go with no silverware and breaking off two sticks and using them to move food into my mouth is the best option.
I'm passable with chopsticks, but I can't think of any situation where I'd prefer them over other utensils.
Almost any pasta. Roasted or boiled veggies. Cheezits or similar, keeps the dust off. Pierogies, most snall dumplings really.
I like them better for ramen, but a fork does about as well.
After a few years it just became natural and I found myself grabbing chopsticks before anything else.
I've been trying to teach my wife to use them when we go out, but the staff always takes pity on her and brings her The Fork of Shame.
They're not difficult to use. It used to be the primary reason in the chart. Now it's second nature.
They're more fun to use than a fork.
Do it for the challenge! IV peaked at sub par but it's still funner than a fork
Because I can lift my bowl and just push the rest of the food in my mouth. Instead of moving it around with a fork.
I use them because it's not polite to shovel food directly into my open maw with my fingers
Same, I never got good at chopsticks in college and early 20s when I was trying to act cool. By the end of a meal my hand always had something akin to writer's cramp. At some point I gave up and went back to forks. And sushi of course is finger food.
I'm far too kack handed for chopsticks so I'll stick with the fork thanks.
No, you fork with the fork. You stick with the sticks. Duh.
Why don't you use them to chop up the steak? I mean it's right there in the name
I'll abandon the fork and spoon when they come up with something better.
They are also useful for stirring nonstick pots.