Why 1.5 billion people eat with chopsticks

Author Jennifer 8. Lee explains how the chopstick spread from the East to the West -- and was designed to give you the perfect bite.

It is such a sort of instrumental part

of our cooking vocabulary,
in terms of the utensils.

And it was like, that's interesting,

there are people
who live without chopsticks.

[Small Thing.]

[Big Idea.]

Chopsticks are a pair of two long sticks

used to eat things with one hand.

Holding chopsticks
is a little bit like holding a pencil,

except that you have two of them

and you move them together
in a pincer movement.

Most of them are made out of wood.
They're also made out of plastic, bamboo,

jade, gold, silver and even ivory,

though I think that's not so cool anymore.

Chopsticks are really well designed
for eating small bits of food.

They're good for picking up noodles.

If you're skilled, you can eat rice,

pick up dumplings, pieces of meat.

There are some no-nos with chopsticks.

You should not use
the chopsticks like drumsticks,

which I know is tempting.

You don't want to stick chopsticks
into a bowl of rice face-up.

And the reason for that is it actually
looks like a bowl of incense,

so it sort of echoes death.

Chopsticks are used
in a huge portion of the world,

across much of Asia,
about 1.5 billion people

are covered in the chopsticks sphere.

Different cultures have slightly different
variations of chopsticks.

Chinese chopsticks
will tend to be long and round,

Korean chopsticks
are flatter and often made of metal

and Japanese chopsticks tend to be round

and very, very pointy.

While chopsticks
are actually really commonplace

in American society today,

there was definitely a time
in the late 1800s

where this idea that Asian men,

because they ate rice with sticks,

were of a different quality
than American men,

who ate proper meat with a knife and fork.

But when China and the United States

began their diplomatic
engagement in the 1970s,

Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger,

had to practice eating with chopsticks.

What's been really interesting to see

is that as Asian cuisine has moved
from the East into the West,

chopsticks have become
part of the experience.

There's evidence of chopsticks
as long ago as the Shang dynasty,

which is about 3000 years ago,

and they loved tripods
during the Shang dynasty.

So when you cook with these big tripods,

chopsticks were actually really useful,

because it was a way
for you to stir and to reach

without getting burned
as the water was boiling

in these really big pots.

Chinese culture has knives and has forks.

It uses them in many cases for cooking.

But in terms of like what
moved into the dining room,

it was the chopsticks.

One of the things about Asian cooking

is that it often comes
in very small pieces.

And I think part of that
has to do with the fact

that it's actually
a lot more energy-efficient

to cook little pieces quickly.

But also, then you don't have to cut them.

So you have a circular influence,

where the type of food that is cooked
allows people to use chopsticks,

and then the fact that you have chopsticks
influences the food that you can cook.

But at the same time, chopsticks reflect
the communal nature of eating food.

You'll have these dishes
that you put in the middle,

it's very family style.

You go in with your chopsticks,

and you put it on your rice,
and then you eat individually.

There's actually a famous sort of legend

where everyone has these
really, really long chopsticks,

like way too long
for them to feed themselves.

And so in hell, everyone starves,

because they can't pick up food
and put it in their mouths.

But in heaven, people
take the same chopsticks

and then feed each other.