It came to me very specifically one day, one lunchtime, in Guelph. Yeah, Guelph, Ontario. We were visiting there a couple of days, trundling through the good downtown bookstore and meeting a university student, daughter of a friend, for coffee and catch-up.
At lunch we went to a Chinese restaurant, your typical Canadian Chinese restaurant, a bit upscale, big and busy, and it had a smorgasbord. That is a great thing in a Chinese restaurant; it means you can load your plate with just two or three items, the gyozas or ribs or whatever it is that you really want to indulge in. Skip the chow mein.
We indulged, and we took our plates to a table and picked up our tools. And I looked around and saw that there were no chopsticks in anyone’s hands, no chopsticks on any of the tables. Just knives, forks and spoons. It was a Eureka moment.
For I knew that it could be, and that there were people, proprietors of restaurants and customers of restaurants, who could make it happen. A meal, whether of rice or dumplings or meat or vegetables or fish or noodles or any darn thing, could be eaten quite handily with knives, forks, and spoons. And here was a town that knew that.
Out west they don’t know that. We don’t know that. Look around you on the BC Ferry. On every sailing you see people slobbering into those giant Dixie cups and pulling up noodles with chopsticks, pushing them up the sides of the cup and then sucking them the rest of the way home.
It is not that I am disgusted by this spectacle. I can watch people eat in a messy way, or not watch them. I am a messer myself, Mikey Messer, like MacHeath in the song. And I have nothing against noodles. It’s just that chopsticks are no good for eating noodles, and any food that comes out of a cup or a bowl should be eaten with a spoon. Food that comes on a plate should be cut up with a knife and pushed onto a fork. Knives, forks and spoons have evolved over the centuries, and they do a good job with any food. Chopsticks don’t. Humans eating with chopsticks look like animals performing in a circus. Though not as dignified.
You are wondering if I am questioning the skills and wisdom of the all-wise East. I am not questioning the skills. If you practice hard with chopsticks for many years, you can do a not-too-messy job of eating messy, bitsy-bitsy food.
What I question is the wisdom.
Look at it this way. When Marco Polo came back from Asia, he brought noodles,
but no little sticks. He ate the noodles by wrapping them around his dagger. To help him in this enterprise, those clever Italian designers devised the multi-pronged instrument that we use today. Some parts of Asia never got the news, and some parts of the West insist on aping the backwards parts of the East. All too often, the blind lead the blind.
By Mike Matthews
