Honestly for a lot of foods they're really not a bad choice. They're excellent for eating flavored chips when you dont want powder on your fingers, also grabbing things from jars
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Who else goes through spoons quicker than any other utensils? In my household
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- Big spoons
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- Little spoons
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- Chop sticks
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- Knives
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- Forks
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- Butter knives
Long spoon. I love long spoon.

We call them Korean fighting spoons. Since it's for reaching side dishes and sauces before others at the table
Little spoons go first for me,. But yes, spoons are the ultimate utensil
Spork enters the chat.
Some fun chopstick facts: most chopsticks in the world (including China) are made in Georgia (the US state, not the country) because of the ready availability of cheap pine. One of the major reasons pine is so prevalent in Georgia (and in the US South in general) is slavery: cotton plantations in the pre-artificial fertilizer era tended to exhaust the soil after a few years, leaving pine trees as the only profitable crop that can be grown on much of the land.
Cotton is a destructive demanding crop. The post industrial era cotton farming has left swaths of land poisoned with arsenic and all sorts of nasties (chicken concentration camps are bad for arsenic too.)
There are foods that just don't hit the same if you don't eat them with chopsticks.
Ever tried to eat sushi with a fork? It just feels wrong.
But if it's a rice bowl, screw the chopsticks. Gimme a spoon.
I firmly believe sushi should be eaten with hands.
Depends on the rice, sticky rice is really easy to eat with chop sticks, you can just generally grab anything and get a chunk. Medium sticky you can scoop up but non sticky/liquid sauce is a non-starter.
Sticking a fork in sushi feels illegal.
Only in Japan. It's punishable by death.
I live in Hawaiʻi. We use chopsticks all the time. Itʻs just... what you do.
Whenever we get takeout and they give us forks instead of chopsticks, my wife and I refer to it as "getting haloeʻd" (for those who donʻt know, "haole" is a Hawaiian term for foreigner that tends be used exclusively for Caucasian people). Thereʻs a general assumption that most whites donʻt know how to use chopsticks. Related, I was once at a Japanese funeral, eating poke and sashimi with chopsticks, and this sweet lady comes up to me and says "you use those so well!" It felt like the white-person version of "youʻre so well-spoken!"
I stopped for dinner once at a Chinese restaurant in Mississippi run by people actually from China. I (white guy) used chopsticks and our server just stared at me wide-eyed for most of the meal. She said I was the first white person she had ever seen using them, and she'd been working there for years. That is Mississippi for you.
I didn't have the heart to tell her I'd learned to use them eating at Japanese restaurants.
I use them for pretty much everything because they’re marginally quicker to clean thoroughly than a fork
Chopsticks are the best utensils for eating chips(crisps in England). I love eating chips but i also love being on my computer. Why get chipdust everywhere when you can be clean?
Once you learn to eat rice with chopsticks you become unstoppable.
Because they are easier to handwash
Chopsticks are great for all kinds of foods. It helps you slow down if you are a fast eater allowing yourself to feel full quicker and eat less. Its helped me lose weight. Also helps when eating popcorn as you eat small bites and don't get your hands dirty.
I like the Emma Thompson story about why she rolls her own cigarettes. The original idea was that if she had to roll her own cigarettes, she would slow down and smoke less. Ultimately, all that it accomplished was to teach her how to roll faster. So now she smoke just as much, but unfiltered.
This is my experience with chopsticks. At this point they don't slow me down, and I'm good enough that I can pick individual sesame seeds off of a plate with ease.
The sure way for me to appear to be an amateur chopstick user is to use them.
I find it just fun to eat with them. In the end, it doesn't matter as much how you are delivering food to your feeding hole.
For me, the green part is: Because I used them while cooking and don't want to get anything else dirty.
I'm still adjusting to them for eating (should probably cut/choose my veggies, noodles etc. to rather be long+thin). But for cooking, I do find them quite good.
I can use wooden chopsticks in my non-stick pan. And they're really useful for stirring food, as you can just hold them close together (or use a single stick), when the food is prone to spilling.
I don't yet have the dexterity to always successfully flip foods in my frying pan with chopsticks, but it's not like I have that with other utensils. Whether chopsticks, spatula or fork, it's always a fiddly bugger.
Soup - drink from bowl and use chopsticks if it has bits
Big soupy thing (ramen, pho, that sort) - spoon and chopsticks
Rice with grains that don't stick together much - spoon
Things like ice cream (dish), applesauce, that sort of consistency: spoon
Food from countries/places that don't cut things down to bite size: knife + fork (sometimes replaced by chopsticks when cutting is done)
Most other non-liquids: chopsticks or no utensil depending upon the case.
~ Person in Japan for over a decade
If you do your hair up with 2 forks you look like a dumb dumb whereas if you use chopsticks you look like somebody who saw a life hack video or post


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