How to use chopsticks — the cheat’s way (Singapore)

S.E.Asian Chinese tend to eat off plates (not bowls), and with fork and spoon (not chopsticks), which is, in my opinion, the best combination:  one can use the fork for pushing the meat / veg / rice onto the spoon, or for spearing morsels of food; the spoon can also be used for scooping up, and transporting, gravy and soup.  Unless the rice is the sticky variety (like Japanese rice) which would allow one to grab a ball of it in one’s chopsticks, one would have to bring the bowl up to the mouth and shovel in the rice, which is most inelegant in my school of upbringing, so the fork-and-spoon method gets round this problem.

I grew up on the fork-and-spoon way of eating, so I was hopeless at handling chopsticks as a child — still am as a grown-up, actually...  

When using chopsticks to pick up the food from the dishes in the middle of the table, the palm of the hand should be facing down.  En route to one’s mouth, the hand would be turned upside down (with the palm facing up) to deliver the food into the mouth.  My inept control of the chopsticks would tend to result in the food falling off as I turned the hand.

Also, I was never properly taught to clasp the chopsticks correctly (with the fingers positioned for gripping and controlling the moving of the chopsticks, to bring them together and to pull them apart), which meant that when I did somehow manage to grab—with my chopsticks—the food off the dishes in the middle of the table, any little twitch of my fingers halfway between the middle of the table and my mouth would result in the chopsticks being twitched askew, sending the food flying off.  

A lot of my sittings at the dining table as a child would end up with more food on the table than in my mouth.

I then came up with this strategy:  (i) hold a Chinese soup spoon in one hand and the chopsticks in the other hand; (ii) use the chopsticks to shovel the food onto the spoon; (iii) bring the spoon up to the mouth; (iv) use the chopsticks to shovel the food into the mouth.  This would give the unobservant onlooker the impression that I was actually using the chopsticks to handle my food.

I still use this trick today, more for an elegant eating style really, but it also means more food ends up in my tummy than on the table.

(Singapore, 1960s)