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

by Bee Wilson

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.