However, the rise of the kamayan dinner should not be taken as a sign that Americans are giving up cutlery. If anything, part of the appeal of eating with your hands, at least for those who don’t do it regularly, is precisely that it’s a break from the norm, made permissible because the food itself is unfamiliar. The American philosopher Lisa Heldke has called such forays “nutritional adventures” and questioned her own curiosity in pursuing them, wondering if she was unconsciously following the same impulse that drove “19th- and 20th-century European painters, anthropologists, and explorers who set out in search of ever of ‘newer’, increasingly ‘remote’ cultures’. Although she tried “to learn about other cultures in ways that I intended to respect,” she writes in “Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer” (2003), “I could not deny that I was motivated by a deep desire to contact and somehow gain the experience of an Exotic Other as a way of making myself more interesting.” They are, therefore, forever doomed tourists wandering outside their culture?
Herein lies the conundrum for chefs and restaurateurs trying to introduce the food of their heritage to Western audiences: how to do so without alienating themselves or whitewashing, playing down, or downplaying what might be considered the most demanding elements of a kitchen — the crunch of the bones of a duck embryo, say, or the honest aroma of fermented fish sauce that lingers on the fingers long after the meal is over.
MAMMOTH OCALO SPOONS from about 23,000 to 22,000 years ago have been found in western Russia. chopsticks, known in China as zhu and later kuaizi, may go back as far as 5000 BC, but historians can only guess what these early utensils were for, whether they were all-purpose tools or intended for cooking rather than individual eating. Knives were first weapons. In a 1927 survey of antique cutlery collections, the English curator CTP Bailey noted that, even in the Middle Ages, only the nobility had dedicated table knives, while “the common citizen kept in his belt an all-purpose knife that could used. equally well to carve his food or cut the throat of his enemy.’ In 17th-century France, Louis XIV banned all pointed knives, perhaps Bailey’s muses, “to discourage murder at mealtimes.” In China around the fourth century BC, people began to switch from hands to spoons (dagger-shaped) and chopsticks, perhaps because those living in the colder north preferred foods that were boiled and presented in hot broth, such as says Chinese American historian Q. Edward Wang suggests in “Chopsticks: A Cultural and Culinary History” (2015).
In Europe, people used soup spoons and knives to cut and stake, but otherwise continued to rely on their hands. The forks came late. The “Iliad,” written in the eighth century BC, refers to “thick forks” lined up for roasting an animal sacrifice, but these were essentially large stabbing tools. A smaller five-inch bronze tool with two wavy teeth from the sixth or seventh century AD, excavated in modern-day Iran, may be evidence that some Persians had adopted them for food at that time. In the 11th century, an Italian Benedictine monk remarked disapprovingly that a Constantinople bride of the Doge of Venice had brought with her to the West the decadent habit of dining with a fork. “She did not touch her food with her hands,” wrote the monk, outraged, and pointed to her death by plague as a seemingly fitting fate for such an “excessive delicacy.” For a man of God, this was a dangerous foreign affection and a betrayal of nature. And for centuries the fork remained suspect in Europe, as an aristocratic accessory. By the 17th century, Louis XIV, amid the splendor of Versailles, was said to insist on grabbing food – from a golden plate – with his fingers.
We know how the story ends. There were practical reasons to submit to the utensils. Not for hygiene reasons, which was little understood at the time. the 12th- and early 13th-century Sephardic physician and philosopher Maimonides, who was born in Andalusia and spent most of his life in northern Africa, advocated handwashing in medical settings to prevent contagion, but this practice it was not standardized until after the advent of germ theory in the 19th century. (If anything, tableware allowed for a different, more magical kind of transmission: The English historian Emanuel Green, in a paper presented to the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society in 1886, slyly offers a quote from a man originally from Malaysia, faced with a British setting: “What do I know about this fork? It’s been in a hundred or more mouths—perhaps the mouth of my greatest enemy.”)