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.

Little spoons go first for me,. But yes, spoons are the ultimate utensil
Spork enters the chat.
Get outta here Popeyes. Your tines are too short to grab the meat, and your ends are too pointy to gather the last 5%. I'd end up full of styrofoam, pawing at a bone like a kitten if I used you. My fingers and teeth work 100x better than you.
Even if I'm backpacking and I need to save weight, I'd rather have a cat-dog version of spoon and fork.
I keep sporks in my car so if i'm starving after a shopping trip I can break into some grub.
Little spoons - by a large margin
Forks
Big spoons
Kitchen knives
Butter knives
/I don't use chopsticks
Whatever falls into the sarlacc pit that is my garbage disposal goes first
i use what's most convenient to grab... for instance i use a spoon, or even a fork, for making a pb&j far more often than a knife. there's a better chance of those being out on the drying rack than a knife. if that means i'm eating ice cream with a fork, i'm eating ice cream with a fork - as long as it's frozen enough.
Depends on what I made that week. If it's a soup or stew, spoons are the first to go.
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.
I used to eat sushi with a fork and it is possible. But that's really about the only food that's easier to eat with chopsticks than fork and knife.
The thing people forget is that the bowl is part of the cutlery.
It's why the bowl is so small. You pick it up!
Shovel that rice into your mouth like a pro chopstick user my friend. Stupid western table manners be damned!
(I'm from a western country, I also dislike the silly rule that you can't bring your face down to your plate/bowl if you're eating something hard to pick up)
Spaghetti with a fork fesls wrong
Yeah it is much better when you suck them in one by one through a drinking straw
Spaghetti with everything feels wrong. The form factor is simply bad. It's not like a garden hose, where you need it to be that long.
It's not my least favorite, but it's a bit down the list. Penne is probably the best general purpose shape, at least according to these guys: https://www.realsimple.com/we-asked-chefs-which-pasta-shape-works-best-in-any-dish-11849324
I'm a fan of rotelle and fiori as well.
Just break it up before you cook it.
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.
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?
I use it them when I douse cheetos with valentina. Two of the most finger stainingest foods known at this point in history.
It's like ambrosia for those of us awaiting cardiac release.
Your crisps have dust? How old are they?
I use them for pretty much everything because they’re marginally quicker to clean thoroughly than a fork
Once you learn to eat rice with chopsticks you become unstoppable.
Because they are easier to handwash
The sure way for me to appear to be an amateur chopstick user is to use them.
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.
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.
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
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
I don't understand chinese restaurants that will cut broccoli and the like into unmanageable pieces, too big for a bite. Idk if it's cultural or a scheme of the all you can eat buffets to lessen the ability to shovel food into your mouth so quickly. Didn't work on me, all you can eat buffets are a mission for me to make them lose money.
I can't speak to Chinese Chinese, but a lot of east Asia cuts things into pieces one can pick up with chopsticks and eat in one bite. I haven't been to a US Chinese buffet in years, but I don't recall overly-large pieces the last time I went. Where I grew up (rural Ohio) not many people used chopsticks I til fairly recently, so maybe I'm forgetting my younger days or perhaps something else is going on.
I always eat my cheetos with chopsticks. That way I don't get degenerate fingers.


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