Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

by Bee Wilson

Cauldrons

The original curfew was a kitchen object: a large metal cover placed over the embers at night to contain the fire while people slept. As for cooking itself, it was largely the art of fire management.

If time was measured through prayer, heat was measured through pain. To test the heat of an oven, you reached inside. This is how bakers still proceed in many parts of rural Europe. You would put a hand in the oven and gauge from the level of pain whether the oven was ready for baking loaves—which require the fiercest heat.

The Japanese came to chopstick culture later than the Chinese (from whom they borrowed the idea), but you would not know it now, from the way that chopsticks shape the entire culinary universe of the country. It was only around the eighth century AD that chopsticks supplanted hands among the common people, but having done so, they rapidly became essential to the Japanese way of eating.

The appetite for disposable chopsticks, moreover, has spread to China, which now manufactures 63 billion pairs annually. By 2011, the Chinese demand for disposable wooden chopsticks was so great that it could no longer supply enough of the right kind of wood for its 1.3 billion citizens. An American manufacturing plant in Georgia has started to plug the gap. The state of Georgia is rich in poplar and sweet gum trees, whose wood is pliable and light enough to need no bleaching before it is made into chopsticks. The company, Georgia Chopsticks, now exports billions of disposable chopsticks to supermarket chains in China, Japan, and Korea, all with a label stating “Made in U.S.A.”

A spork is not one thing or another, but in-between. In the Pixar-animated film Wall-E, a robot in a postapocalyptic wasteland attempts to clear up the detritus left behind on planet earth by the human race. He heroically sorts old plastic cutlery into different compartments, until encountering a spork. His little brain cannot cope with this new object. Does it go with the spoons? Or the forks? The spork is uncategorizable.