THE FORK AS METAFORK

In the very beginning, no doubt, we were animals as far as our table manners were concerned...ripping into food with teeth and nails.  But evidence now suggests that more civilized eating is pretty basic to our evolution too.  Eating utensils have been dated back at least 500,000 years. 

Sharp shards of flint and obsidian found at fire pits suggest the early use of a kind of knife to divide foodstuff into edible chunks.  Very impressive designwise, but of course most beasts can tear and shred with built-in tools in the way of claws and really good incisors.  We are the ones who must reshape the world to make it work for us.  The challenge of holding, handling, and hanging food over a fire points to something even more unique in the human animal...a need for control, a means of grasping the world, of manipulating and managing.  And for this we can be proud of one invention that symbolizes this very human trait…the fork.

Not just effective, the fork is as fine a metaphor for our compulsion to take charge as we are likely to find.  Try eating with two knives as our ancestors did well into the Middle Ages, by using one to hold the food and the other to cut it; you will quickly see the limits of this system.  A pointed knife is not a very good holding device.  The food squishes, twirls, slides and jiggles under the slender blade.  Bibs were invented around the same time.

It was not until the knife grew into a tool with tines that forkdom came to its dominant place at the table of life.  This happened in various places all around the world.  Ancient Greek kitchen forks, Neptune's trident, and hayforks notwithstanding, the first mention of the fork as a table tool did not come until the 14th century in Italy and France.  It did not spread to England until the 17th century, even later in the Colonies.  These forks were two-pronged affairs with long thin tines widely spaced.  Although much ridiculed at first as an "effeminate piece of finery," once introduced, there was no stopping the evolution of the fork.  Three tines – to better hold the morsels – were popular by the next century, and by the late 1700's four tines were all the rage.  A tine every one hundred years may not seem like much but innovation is not always swift.  Other arrangements were tried, but four tines -- just enough to hold food and no more -- seems to be the optimum. 

As with the design of any artifact, the slow steady evolution of the fork – the result of a changing world – itself changed the world around it.  Forks slowed down eating and made meals more formal affairs.  With a device to hold the food, the table knife was then freed to evolve into a blunt instrument for cutting rather than stabbing, and flat spoons became common for scooping and stirring.  But the ripples do not stop there.  Yea…and with tableware came dinner and chatter and all manner of etiquette and fuss.  After all, the fork is not just for eating.  It is for eating in the type of society in which eating is done with a fork.  And that is a special kind of place, for the gathering of beings that do not just inhabit the world, but aim to manipulate it with every single bite.