Nicholas Netzer
Contemporary China 370
Dr. Charles Hammond
Journal #6
As most people know, many of the East Asian cultures use chopsticks to eat their food. How they came to be on the other hand, not too many people know about. Chopsticks actually have quite a long history and it is believed that they have been around for nearly 5000 years. The theory is that the Chinese people would cook their meat in large metal pots and it would take a long time for the pots to cool off. The people were usually quite ready to eat well before the pots cooled off so they needed something to remove the food from the pot without being burned, so they would use twigs to pull the food out of the large pots. They began to chop their meat up into small pieces so that it would cook quicker, and the larger twigs eventually became smaller and smaller until they became chopsticks.
China has been introduced to different eating utensils over the years, but it is believed that due to Confucianism people in the China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan have not began to use knives and forks at the table more commonly. It is believed Confucius taught that knives are weapons of death and only warriors and barbarians would bring such things to the table. The ideals of his and Buddhism spread throughout the whole of China the beliefs of nonviolence gained hold and they felt that they did not have any need for utensils that reminded them of weapons of death.
The info I used was mostly from http://www.siamese-dream.com/chopsticks/history_chopsticks.html and http://www.infoplease.com/spot/chopsticks1.html on the web.
