Everything Is Bigger in the United States (Including Forks)
How a small design differences make the everyday feel wrong
Everything is bigger in the United States: cars, roads, ovens, chairs, beds, mattresses, you name it. Not just a little bigger either — kitchen appliances are easily two to three times as large. People having recently immigrated hesitate ordering anything online because they don’t have a sense of how large a piece of furniture might be. Just like the average size of an American house is likely much bigger than a house in their home county.
More unsettling is the differences in cutlery size. American forks have longer tines (by about 30% for the forks below) and somewhat longer handls. This is true of most brands I’ve encountered, and it cannot readily be explained by a difference in anthropometric measurements, such as hand size.
While it is not always immediately visible, that difference is felt. The easy fix? Using a pastry fork for the main dish.
Making a well-balanced fork is a more difficult exercise than most might realize. A fork needs to be easy to grasp and hold, afford picking and eating food. They have been extensively studied. Consider for instance these diagrams from 1950 by the Swedish Home Research Institute (Hemmens forskningsinstitut), describing the shape, length, and thickness of different parts of an ergonomic fork, closer to European than American forks. Its size is in fact remarkably similar to that of Ikea’s in the pictures above.
Why the difference? If cutlery size followed people’s, European forks would have gotten larger. My hypothesis is that during the standardization of manufactured products post World War 2, American cutlery became larger either because they could, either for cheaper products or higher disposable income. Larger cutlery may have been associated with a higher social status. It became a local standard, on which later products aligned. I do wonder how it affects eating, beyond being a little uncomfortable to those of us not born in America.
