You probably use a fork every day, yet you never think much about this multi-pronged utensil, do you? That may change after you hear this, and you might find yourself getting curious about other everyday things in your home as well. Why not? Everything has interesting stories, and connecting to things like forks helps us feel more connected to this complex and seemingly disjointed world.
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Listen on YouTube:
A few resources:
How the simple fork almost tore apart the fabric of society (National Geographic)
A history of Western eating utensils, from the scandalous fork to the incredible spork (Smithsonian)
The rise of the fork (Slate)
Origins of the common fork (Leite’s Culinaria)
Music: Jens East — Daybreak (ft. Henk) www.soundcloud.com/jenseast
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution V4.0
Cover image of forks from Pixabay
Transcription (remember, this is a direct transcription of what I said and is not actually how I write!):
Welcome to 9 Minutes of Wonder. I’m Betsy Hedberg. I hope this podcast will help you rekindle your sense of wonder for this awe-inspiring world. If you like what you hear in the next few minutes, please subscribe and share.
Hello everyone, I’m back. I have taken a bit of a break because I had to deal with some annoying things that are hopefully getting better, so I’m back to talking about things that inspire wonder and awe.
So what I say today might not really inspire wonder or awe, but I will explain why I’m going to talk about forks.
I bet you’ve used a fork multiple times within the past 24 hours, right? Unless you live in many parts of Asia where people are more likely to eat with chopsticks or with their hands. And I’ve used a fork most recently about an hour ago.
So most of us use them every day, yet we pay almost no attention to them, right? We just use them, put them in our mouths and eat.
So what on Earth am I talking about? With all the important things going on in the world that are calling for our attention, and all the problems in the world, and all of that, and all the good things too, why the hell am I talking about forks? Could anything be less relevant?
The way I see it, it’s not that forks themselves are important, although, I mean, they’re important eating utensils, right? But it’s not that the topic of forks is important, but this kind of close attention to something everyday, mundane, that we take for granted, can apply to anything.
And it’s the attention that is the point. So we can probably agree that forks aren’t really awe-inspiring. But when we pay more attention to our surroundings, even to the most mundane things, and when we remember that most things have interesting stories, this enriches our lives and reminds us that everything is connected to many other things.
This is a mindful approach, since we get a chance to slow down and pay attention to one thing rather than a hundred things at once, like we’re often trying to do. And this mindfulness can increase our propensity toward creative thinking, and it can even help us relax. And you know, paying this sort of attention can open the possibility for paying attention to things that really do inspire awe and wonder.
What are forks anyway? What are they made of? Do you ever think about this as you’re putting one into your mouth?
Most forks these days are made from stainless steel. So what’s that? Stainless steel — I didn’t know this, but now I do — it contains four main ingredients: iron, carbon, chromium, and nickel.
It’s the chromium that forms the protective layer that they call stainless. You don’t have to understand or be interested in all the chemistry to think about how this is kind of an impressive process.
And I’ve read that stainless steel actually does rust, but we don’t notice the rust because it only happens to the outermost few layers of atoms, which is not something we would notice. So your stainless steel forks rust, but it doesn’t matter and you don’t see it.
Of course many fancy or old forks are made from silver. Silver is an element in the Earth — I won’t get into the details of how that is mined and processed — but it comes from various places including Mexico, Canada, Poland, Bolivia, Peru, Australia, and the United States.
Now forks themselves as a utensil have a really interesting history. They’ve been used for a really long time, although early examples weren’t for personally sticking into your mouth, but instead used to spear larger pieces of meat and to help with cooking and carving. Archaeologists have found forks made from bone in ancient China from up to 4,500 years ago, and they found forks in ancient Egypt.
In some earlier places and times it was common to bring your own knife to the table to cut and to eat mainly with your hands — so no forks — and they think that spoons came as a result of wanting to scoop up liquid, as you might imagine.
Using a fork to actually eat the food began during the Byzantine Empire, so maybe around modern Turkey sometime between the 4th and 7th centuries, depending on the sources that I looked at.
In the year 1004, a wedding was held in Venice between the children of two prominent families. The bride brought a case of two-pronged golden forks from her home, which was probably in Constantinople, or present-day Istanbul. She then proceeded to eat with at least one of these forks. The local clergy were aghast, and one of them wrote, “God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks — his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to him to substitute artificial metal forks for them when eating.”
Now this bride very unfortunately died of plague a couple years later, and some people suggested that she died because she did things like eat with forks. For example, Peter Damian, a Benedictine monk who later became a saint (hope I pronounced his name right if you’re into saints) said, “Nor did she deign to touch her food with her fingers, but would command her eunuchs to cut it up into small pieces, which she would impale on a certain golden instrument with two prongs and thus carry to her mouth…this woman’s vanity was hateful to Almighty God, and so unmistakably did he take his revenge. For he raised over her the sword of his divine justice, so that her whole body did putrefy, and all her limbs began to wither.”
Oh my God, that’s pretty harsh! So according to him, it was all her fault because she went against God’s will, and this was actually a common sentiment in the Middle Ages. The church frowned on forks because they were considered tools of the devil, and you’ve got to admit they do kind of resemble the Devil’s pitchfork, which is one recent idea about why forks might have been considered so controversial.
Forks didn’t become immediately popular in Europe for obvious reasons, except some forks that were used to eat syrupy foods that could be messy, and those forks were only used by certain elite people. They were considered overly effeminate too, which did not help their image at that time.
But a few hundred years later, Catherine de’ Medici went from her home in Italy, where forks had begun to catch on, to France to marry the man who would one day be Henry II. And when she went there, she brought some beautiful silver forks. But the wedding guests didn’t have a clue how to use them, and they made a really big mess, which is easy to understand since the forks back then only had two tines. But still, the wealthy French people were somehow impressed with all of this, and they began to use forks after that. It was kind of a catchy fashion started by a very fashionable woman, and the trend has obviously stuck.
Okay, enough of the history. Let’s talk about the forks of today.
The Wikipedia article about forks lists 19 types of fork, including the crab fork, fondue fork, ice cream fork, knork, which is a knife and fork combo, the spork (you may know that one, the spoon and fork combo), the sporf, which is a spoon knife and fork combo, and it’s also called a splade, and a terrapin fork for eating turtle soup, which is not very popular anymore.
If you’re interested in buying a new fork, they’ve got some on eBay. And if you’re interested in spending a lot of money on a fork, the most expensive fork I found right now on eBay is 1 million US dollars, or best offer. Shipping is only $15.58 to a US address. So buy yours now. You get this other little thing that’s kind of a knife-fork combo. I can’t remember what that’s called.
But okay, seriously, you don’t need a million dollars to find it more interesting to eat with a fork today than you did before you listened to me talk about forks.
When you pick up a fork for the next time, just spend a moment thinking about its backstory, no matter whether it’s a plastic spork from the supermarket or a beautiful silver fork from your grandmother’s collection. And give it some attention, and then think about what other things in your life that you take for granted you can give some attention to. And next time, I will talk about something even more awe-inspiring.
See you then.