Why Do the Chinese Use Chopsticks?

I say, you ever wonder why the Chinese use chopsticks?

Well, it’s got something to do with Confucius and ... Cardinal Richelieu?

I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense right now, but it’s actually true, sort

of … and the two men did have one thing in common: they both hated eating with knives.

Now, you might wonder, what’s wrong with knives?

After all, we’ve been using them since neolithic times.

They're the simplest way to stuff your face ... until they aren’t, and that’s where

chopsticks come in.

The first chopsticks (that we know of at least) are around three thousand years old, and were

found in the ruins of the city of Yin, the last capital of the Shang Dynasty in Northern

China.

Now, interestingly enough, these chopsticks were only used to stir stews; they weren’t

actually used for eating.

The Shang Dynasty also used long forks in their kitchens, yet for meal times, it was

the good old knife and fingers.

So when did chopsticks make their way to the dining table?

Well, to find the answer to that we need to fast forward a millennium or so, to around

two thousand years ago during the Han Dynasty.

Like their Shang predecessors, the Han ate almost exclusively millet: it didn’t need

fertilizer or particularly good soil, which was great because the north had neither.

The Han made porridge out of their millet and as you can imagine, eating porridge with

chopsticks is not exactly the easiest thing to do, so it never caught on.

But as the Han Dynasty expanded south, their diet started changing.

You see, the south was perfectly suited for growing rice; in fact, rice grew so plentifully

there that they had enough leftover to feed the north with it too.

Now, you might think that it’s equally difficult to eat rice with chopsticks, but East Asian

rice is starchy and conveniently sticks together in nice clumps: very easy to grab with a couple

of sticks.

Of course, it wasn’t just rice that did it: in the north, millet had another challenger

- wheat.

More wheat meant less porridge and more noodles and dumplings, which of course leads to chopsticks

again.

This period also saw the rise of stir frying – for which food was pre-cut into bite-sized

morsels, all the easier to pick up and eat with your trusty chopsticks.

They’re pretty damn versatile, these chopsticks, and what was even better: they’re cheap.

This actually matters quite a lot when you’ve got a population as big as China’s, which

- mind you - was about 1/4th of the entire world’s population at the time.

More people means less resources to go round: less metal for knives and forks, less fuel

for fires.