Do People Really Still Eat With Chopsticks?

I must have been a savage as a kid because I can still hear my mother yelling "Use your fork" as I quite often devoured my meal while using my fingers.

I'm a senior now and still prone to picking things up off my plate with my fingers.

I'm right at home gnawing on a chicken bone or ribs, even in a restaurant.

I was probably a young adult before being confronted with chopsticks for the first time and immediately dismissed them as ancient relics of the past. After all, if God wanted people to use chopsticks, he wouldn't have given us forks, right?

Invented by the Chinese, Asians have used chopsticks for more than three thousand years. The fork, on the other hand, was introduced in Europe in the 10th century.

It makes more sense – you just stab and eat. No balancing your peas between two sticks.

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Recently while waiting for Tim Weisberg to wrap up his show so I could enter the studio to begin mine, I peered into the newsroom, and there was Kate Robinson chomping on her homemade lunch with chopsticks.

So naturally, I stuck my nosy head in there to ask why. After all, a fork is so much easier, no?

"I use chopsticks sometimes because they're easier to clean than forks and often easier to maneuver food with," Kate said. "Imagine delicately picking up a piece of, say, tofu with rounded tongs instead of a fork. Using a fork would destroy the piece of tofu before it ever gets to your mouth!"

I get it. That must be why I don't eat tofu.

Kate said chopsticks are also "versatile" since you "can easily shovel rice into your face just like using a fork if you want."

No! That's what a spoon is for!

Kate noted that chopsticks come in "plastic, or metal as well as wood or bamboo, and can even be quite pretty, with fun designs."

They can have other uses as well.

"In a pinch, you can also use them to keep your hair up!" she said.

Kate said she uses chopsticks to cook.

"They're great for flipping frying meat," she said. "I don't even own tongs."

I really learned something from this experience: mind your own damn business and stay out of the newsroom while Kate is having lunch.