And that’s why chopsticks are the coolest eating implements in the world
Backstory
Not so long ago I was at a Korean restaurant in Cambridge (Little Seoul, it’s good: tasty food in a setting that takes you right away from the city, and indeed, life in general, for the relaxing space of a single meal). Dinner came with some rather elegant metal chopsticks. Unfortunately, I wasn’t so elegant to go with them. Anyone with poor chopstick skills knows that eating at chopstick establishments can be a bit of a drawn out experience, leaving you with cramped hands and a much clearer understanding that many small bites does indeed fill you up MUCH more effectively than a few big bites.
Story
So, I equipped myself with some sticks for home use, with the idea that eating anything compatible (that is, solid) with them at every opportunity, as a matter of routine, would enable me to really relax into the calming space of a Korean, or Japanese, or Chinese, or Thai (any others?) restaurant in future.
Sidenote
It turns out my current chopsticks are Taiwanese, of Chinese design. They’re pictured in this Wikipedia article, at the top of the photo here. I got them from Oriental Direct on Mill Road.
Lessons Learned
Little did I realise the true wonder of chopsticks. Eating with chopsticks, can, I am now convinced, be considered a Zen art, in the true tradition of Eugene Herrigel (author of Zen in the Art of Archery, now recognised to be the misinterpretations of an early Japanese fanboy, but so popular that they got imported into Japan as a result, and eventually installed as part of Japanese culture anyway, or so I am led to believe).
Too much muscular tension is manifested as acrobatic food and tired fingers, too little muscular tension is manifested as falling food, and even falling chopsticks. (Eating with chopsticks encourages that mental and muscular poise that sits in the tiny sweet-spot between over-tense and over-relaxed: it teaches ‘alertness’ of the hands.) Attention must be paid to the food: trying to use a computer, or read, while eating with chopsticks, is a non-starter, although I suspect this may change with time. Picking up chopsticks with one hand (as opposed to clumsily ‘setting them up’ with the other hand) is a nice exercise in digital choreography. Advancing this to the stage where the chopsticks can be put down and picked up at will throughout a meal, without the thought of having to ‘set them up again’ being a soul-destroying one, is another challenge which is nice to get past.
The process of gaining true physical understanding of the positioning of the fingers on the chopsticks for maximum mechanical advantage and avoidance of unnecessary muscular tension can truly be compared to picking up any Zen skill, be it breathing, meditation, martial arts, flower arranging or the tea ceremony.
Recently the idea of ‘experiential learning’ as compared with ‘theoretical knowledge’ has been raised in my awareness. I think the Zen arts can be a wonderful demonstration that this is a false dichotomy: in my experience experiential learning and theoretical knowledge are just two complementary sides of the same coin, each one benefiting from appropriate application of the other, until in the final analysis one cannot be distinguished from the other. (What is theoretical knowledge anyway? What is knowledge without application?)
And that’s why chopsticks are the coolest eating implements in the world.
