The cultural politics of fork usage are surprisingly complex. (Knives down, Americans!)
How I got silverware shamed by a British friend
Iwill never forget the time my British friend, we’ll call her Sara, looked across the table and declared dryly, “Americans eat like animals.” My mouth dropped. I peered down at my plate. Everything seemed tidy enough. There was the salad, albeit slightly overdressed, there the herbed potato cubes and a small squirt of ketchup, there the flaky salmon filet. Was my back hunched? Had ketchup crusted on my chin? Was I grunting with each bite?
“You stab your fork into everything,” Sara said, demonstrating by jabbing a bed of spinach. “You’re meant to scoot food onto the back of the fork using the knife in your right hand. Look! It even works with salad.”
I laughed off her insult (or joke? Who can tell with Brits?) and concentrated on calming my fork-spearing. Meanwhile, she merrily scooted the rest of her meal. Her fork never transferred from her left hand to her right. With one leaf of spinach balanced on the curve of her utensil, I had to admit Sara looked quite elegant.
Americans are famous for fork-switching, the practice of cutting a piece of food with a knife in the right hand and a fork in the left, then transferring the fork to the right hand to pierce at 90 degrees what is likely a hulking, bloody slice of steak, and stuffing it into our gaping gullet. Some Canadians do the same, but most prefer the more traditional Continental European style, in which the right hand wields a knife and the left a fork, throughout the entire meal. In Britain, most diners even keep their fork tines pointed down. (It gets awkward with foods like spaghetti or peas, which Brits often resort to smushing onto the top-back of the fork.)
Any deviation and you’re an animal, apparently.
What I should have told Sara is that forks are the infants of the utensil family. So they’re new to all of us, and who exactly does she think she is? Ancient Greeks used knives and spoons when eating. If those didn’t work, they resorted to fingers. During the Byzantine period in the 11th century, it seems the first people to take up pronged utensils were nobles intent on keeping their hands clean. One manuscript referred to a Venetian princess who would “command her eunuchs to cut [food] up into small pieces, which she would impale on a certain golden instrument with two prongs and thus carry to her mouth.” From there, French nobility devised elaborate table etiquette in the 16th century as a political intimidation tactic; their new customs required inventions in cutlery. The fork shape-shifted into different lengths, girths, weights, and materials.
Over the next 200 years, as Europeans began to carve out dedicated eating areas in the home, people purchased more sets of utensils. Among the genteel class, it became fashionable to host banquets and grand soirees. Particularly in France, physical poise and sophistication was key. And what better way to eat smoothly than by using one’s dominant hand to eat? Thus, the fork-switch became fashionable.
At the time, and into the 19th century, Americans regarded French custom as the height of civility. Once fork-switching became vogue, we took it up with relish. But, as with most things French, what was charming today turned passé tomorrow. By the 1850s, according to a French etiquette book, the country dropped the trend for the Continental method once again.
The U.S. kept on. In 1928, Emily Post tried to reason with us. “To zig-zag the fork from left hand to right at nearly every mouthful is a ridiculous practice of the would-be elegant that is never seen in best society,” she wrote. Americans didn’t listen. Later, daughter Anna Post explained that the tradition stuck in the states because it was considered threatening to hold a knife at the dinner table. (Perhaps violence during meals was more common then?) Rather than offend, an American was to put the knife down and lay a hand in his lap. “Europeans think this is gauche. Your call,” allowed Monique P. Yazigi in a 1996 New York Times article.
Recently, Americans have made the call. More are eating like Europeans, without switching their fork between every bite. According to Anna Post, this is in part due to the globalization of cultural practices. But increasingly, young Americans view the fork-switch method as awkward and formal. They prefer to keep things simple and streamlined. If it’s fried chicken, use your fingers; if it’s boiled chicken, slice and stab, no switch necessary. As for pointing the tines down, Post sees it as optional — no need to smush when one can scoop.
Personally, I don’t zigzag as much as I used to. After I cut, I’m generally comfortable forking with my left hand. But give me a giant salad and I’ll right-hand stab that thing to smithereens. How else do you get lettuce, tomato, chicken, hard-boiled egg, bacon bits, cheese, and crouton onto one big, American bite? Spinach-balance my ass, Sara. Pardon my French.
