Case for the Chopsticks

For last six months or so I found myself fascinated with chopsticks. Using them religiously at work and at home and any chance I get in the restaurants. It went so far that I kind of find using knives and forks almost uncivilized. It all happened one winter night in California when my eyes glazed upon set of bamboo chopsticks that look very appealing, in oddly enough Filipino fish market. My experience before that with chopsticks was very limited to short/cheap once from Panda Express or “High End” (translation heavy duty, indestructible, heavy and uncomfortable) ceramic utensils in high end Restaurants.

What I like about them is their incredible simplicity, easiness to clean and precision control they offer in eating. I find it almost uncomfortable to talk about my need to consume large amount of organic food on daily basis. Clarification about the “organic”, I mean foods that contain organic molecules and not just labeled as one.

The chopsticks I discovered is nice/inviting hardwood brown color, packaged nicely and sold for little more than $3 for set of six. I thing at his price it is a steal, considering that I am using one set for over during this period and it does not show any wear from all this use and repeated washing.

The chopsticks are round, I would have said long before but now I think they are just the right size.

Now let’s talk about the benefits of eating with chopsticks.

Quick update: Since this article creation I became more involved with chopstick making and want to share my achievements. Please visit http://joyofwoodworkinghobby.com/content/chopstick-factory to see my hand mde chopstick creation techniques.

Chopsticks Make Food Taste Better

Not really, you need to take my word for it, they really do. They give you this incredible freedom to select and mix different flavors from the food palate in front of you, allowing to create your own personalized experience in eating a dish with your own creative combinations. Imagine the limitless combinations you have while eating some complex dish with meats, grains, vegetables and various souses. You can eat the same dish over and over with unique experience each time.

And wait until you tried to eat desert and ice cream with them. The experience is divine and the combinations are limitless. How about dry fruits and nuts and their combinations? What about salads? You need to drop everything and go get yourself a pair of chopsticks and jump start your eating entertainment, since you deserve it and should not miss out on this.

Eating With Chopsticks Is Good For Your Health

There is mysterious benefit that I found after all this time of enjoying the better foods with chopsticks. And I am not talking about the taste parade that borderlines to gourmet meals due to selective combinational variety.

What I am talking about is weight loss and I am basing this on my experience. After all this food rediscovery I found myself worried about my health and was surprised that I lost five pounds in six months by not even trying.

Here is my conclusion on the subject. We all know that sometimes we overeat because our stomach sends “I am full” signal to our brain with little delay, hence giving all this glorified “Doctors” this magical and very expensive procedure called “Liposuction”, and this word even sounds unpleasant. But let’s talk about Doctors later. While eating with chopsticks even a small meal can seem this large dish due to minute amounts of food intake. This forces one to take longer and enjoy it better and eventually get better food conversion efficiency due to limited food intake, better chewing and  enjoying (producing more saliva) during food consumption.

Eating with Chopsticks is more Hygienic

While eating with any utensil will give you instant benefit of not touching the food with bare hands, weather those are spoons, forks or chopsticks.

This is where similarities end and chopsticks shines in the presence of their distant cousins. The chopsticks hardly touch my mouth when I am eating, unless I am using them with ice cream or dessert. Not that I encourage you in this risky experiment but just suggesting this thought experiment. Imagine group of people eating from same large plate and let’s personalize by suggesting one of them to be you. That seems to be cruel and unusual punishment for whatever minor offence you did. So let’s modify the experiment and offer you to join one of tables where  group of people are enjoying this incredible dish served in one plate using Spoons, another group using Forks, third group using their hands and the last one using Chopsticks. At this point I would not even insult your intelligence by asking which group would you join, since the answer is obvious, the one with chopsticks. Even if all else is equal, the surface area of chopsticks is much smaller than any other utensil and the mechanism of eating with them is not encouraging contact with anything but food.

Not counting that they don’t have complicated shapes and crevices that gives Chopsticks superior ability to be disinfected and easily cleaned.

Chopsticks are potentially lifesavers

 Oddly enough during my obsession with chopsticks I came into a situation where I started to appreciate them more. I went to camping and forgot my chopsticks. When the discovery was made I was hundred miles away from home but I managed to survive, what a hero I can swear just heard some girl calling me that.

My solution was simple. I comely approached one of desert bushes, stripped two branches, disinfected them with fire and proceeded to use my swiftly improvised “Organic” chopsticks in civilized manner. The day was saved and that incident gave me an Idea. What if someone went back into Stone Age and introduced chopsticks to humanity during that time period. The consequences would be longer life, less disease, more selective eating and much better hygiene, even without washing hands.

  The technology or actually lack of it makes them easily adaptable at any technological level of development.

It would even improve the life in medieval time period when wooden spoons were popular.

Since those chopsticks I had improved my technique and produced many others. 

Chopsticks improve your Vision

This could sound like exaggeration but it helped me to improve my near sight vision. Basically I find myself looking much closer at my food since I am trying to select each individual piece separately. That makes my food getting much more attention than before and me staring at it up-close at each delicious byte.

There is a hidden discrimination of chopstick lovers

While I am not in fund of burgers, something about cow eyes in them turns me off, even though I am carnivorous and know that this was clever gimmick by all those tree huggers and vegetarians. While I find them fascinating, I don’t share their enthusiasm and devotion to the causes that are long lost in my mind. But that is matter for different blog. I am just wondering why we don’t offer chopsticks in fast food restaurants? Or why we have limited amount of dishes that can be consumed with chopsticks? I can imagine some fast food chain coming up with 30 burgers available for $10 that come with commemorative set of Bamboo chopsticks and it fits in tiny plate. I would jump at that opportunity. Lots of foods can be prepared to be chopstick friendly manner when peace’s are tiny and civilized. And who is going to stand up to Panda and tell them to stop messing with us by serving us those ridiculous chopsticks. How would the owners feel if we present them with shrimp forks and tea spoons at thanksgiving dinner? And at the end we gave them toothpicks half the size of the regular ones and for some reason are square.

Chopsticks can be used for…

You can cut food with chopsticks, poke them to lift them up, use them as little shovels or precision tweezers. They are fully recyclable and biodegradable. They could be impregnated with rear minerals needed for normal diet or making our teeth stronger. But before chopsticks end up in non-flight list I should be silenced…  

In conclusion all I can say is…

That all this descriptions and advice on this page should be taken with grain of salt. Do not just agree with me, come up with your own examples and know that this blog was written based on my own personal experiences and yours might differ. If you like my blog posts or articles then help me by giving me feedback by donating or buying from my amazon wish list. In any case if you are reading this than you are highly intelligent curious person and I hope you like my blog.