fun fact. loads of locals within asia spear shit with chopsticks on the daily. people only care if the skin color and eye shapes dont match, which is double funny! F*ck you slippery water boiled mystery balls!!!
Eh, depends on the locale and what’s being speared. E.g. Americans use knives and forks but would be aghast at somebody using them for pizza or a burger. But even that still depends where you are, some places it would barely merit a raised eyebrow. Similar, I suspect, for chopstick (mis)use. When in Rome [Asian country of choice], etc.
totally. normally it seems to do more with people that have extreme anxiety/control issues/ocd/doichebaggery trying to get into other peoples business too much. I found the japanese having burgers without buns and eating them with forks on rice weird too, but it’s none of my business. frankly, I kind of like the idea seeing it here in Taiwan now.
until people start shooting boogers across the aisles or not washing their hands when touching your dishes I feel folks can just observe in silence. then bash the shit out of them online, anonymously, like civilized folk
edit. my grandparents in canada always ate pizza with knife and fork. to each their own. granted, they also wielded the belt.
You don’t hold your ramen bowl up against at your month and scoop your noodles into your mouth. You leave the bowl on the table, and pick up the noodles with your chopsticks.
Another thing that’s always interesting to watch is how inexperienced people try to eat hard-shell tacos. That’s another one of those things that I grew up with, so it all just comes naturally (holding the taco shell vertically so stuff doesn’t spill out, turning your head on the side to bite, biting from the top of the taco so that the bottom of the taco is always wider than the top to form a stable base to keep the contents in, knowing how to deal with a fracturing taco shell, etc.), but it’s almost always a disaster for people who have never tried to eat one before.
When I first went to my now in-laws I offered to cook a meal. It was only when I was serving it that I realised they had no cutlery. We all had to eat coq au vin and mashed potatoes with chopsticks.
I find it hard to eat non-sticky rice with chopsticks, also a lot of typical Chinese dishes are hard to eat with chopsticks, like slippery items or big chunks of things, like pork chop.
You’re supposed to just scoop the rice into your mouth. They don’t eat single-piece pork chops in China like they do here in Taiwan. I don’t understand why they don’t cut it up into small pieces unless you ask.
I find picking up small things challenging but not impossible. When I get kung pao chicken, for example, I like to eat the peanuts in that one at a time (or a half at at time since the peanuts often separate during cooking).
I was at a salad bar buffet recently and scooped a bunch of corn kernels on top of my salad, and the only utensil I had to eat with were chopsticks. It was incredibly inefficient to pick up the corn kernels one at a time with the chopsticks. They’re also slippery, so it’s impossible to try to grab a clump of them at once with the chopsticks. I suppose the only efficient strategy would be to use a leaf of lettuce as a sort of wrapper, and to manipulate the leaf with the tips of the chopsticks so as to wrap around several corn kernels at once. (But in my case, I had no lettuce in my salad, only beans, corn, and other small vegetable chunks, so nothing could be used as a “wrapper” to grab a clump of individual corn kernels.)
Stabbing things with forks is so American! The European way of using cutlery is using a fork and a knife. The knife then doubles as a spatula to push food onto the fork
Nobody warned me about this when I first visited the US - I was truly shocked that knifes were only available when ordering a steak. Otherwise, they will use a fork to cut chicken (well, it’s more like squishing it…)…
Eh, same as non-sticky rice, just scoop horizontally bringing the chopsticks together as you go until just narrow enough things aren’t falling through, easy peasy, er, corny!