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

by Bee Wilson

Every new technology represents a trade-off: something is gained, but something is also lost.

When we eat chewier, less processed foods, it takes us more energy to digest them, so the number of calories our body receives is less. You will get more energy from a slow-cooked apple puree than a crunchy raw apple, even if the calories on paper are identical.

Technology is the art of the possible. It is driven by human desire—whether the desire to make a better cupcake or the simple desire to stay alive—but also by the materials and knowledge available at any given time. Food in cans was invented long before it could easily be used. A patent for Nicolas Appert’s revolutionary new canning process was issued in 1812, and the first canning factory opened in Bermondsey, London, in 1813. Yet it would be a further fifty years before anyone managed to devise a can opener.

Historians of technology often quote Kranzberg’s First Law (formulated by Melvin Kranzberg in a seminal essay in 1986): “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”

One-pot cookery is a cuisine of scarcity: scarce fuel, scarce utensils, scarce ingredients. Nothing is wasted. It is no coincidence that food for the relief of poverty has almost always taken the form of soup. If there is not enough to go around, you can always add some more water and bubble it up one more time.

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.

The United States is today one of only three countries not to have officially adopted the French metric system. The other two are Liberia and Myanmar (Burma).

This technological stagnation reflects a harsh truth. There was very little interest in attempting to save labor when the labor in question was not your own.

There are also taboos about the sharing of chopsticks. The Shinto religion has a horror of impurity or defilement of any kind. There is a belief that something that has been in someone else’s mouth picks up not merely germs, which would be killed by washing, but aspects of their personality, which would not. To use a stranger’s chopsticks is therefore spiritually disgusting, even when they have been washed. Professor Naomichi Ishige is an anthropologist of Japanese food who has published over eighty books. He once conducted an experiment on some of his Japanese seminar students, asking them: “Suppose you lend an article that you use to someone else, who uses it, and then thoroughly cleans it before returning it to you. Which article would you have the strongest sense of psychological resistance against reusing afterward?” The two objects that most often cited were a pair of undergarments “for the lower part of the body” and a pair of chopsticks.

It is sometimes assumed that these waribashi are a modern Western in-flux, akin to polystyrene cups. But this is not so: they have been used ever since the beginnings of the Japanese restaurant industry in the eighteenth century, because giving a fresh pair of chopsticks to all customers was the only way a restaurateur could assure his clientele that what they put in their mouth was not defiled.

All kitchen tools should be ergonomic, because their role has—in theory—always been to help humans cook. But it is striking how often traditional designs have hindered our movement around a kitchen in small ways we do not even notice until a better way is shown.

Many of these ergonomic tools seem to bring us closer to the old preindustrial ways, when people tended to make their own tools. The household wooden spoon felt just right because it was whittled just for you. So much high-tech gadgetry is alienating because—however impressive it may be on its own terms—it seems to be doing battle with the human body.

This is why, to answer Hervé This’s question, we still cook with whisks, fire, and saucepans as they did in medieval times. We do so because most of the time, in most kitchens, whisks, fire, and saucepans still do the job pretty well. All we want is better whisks, better fire, and better saucepans.