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Eating Cheetos with Chopsticks
Chopsticks are, in a general manner, inferior to the fork. Forks are more effective over a wider range of food, and they’re easier to master as well. Really in this day and age, the major reason to learn chopsticks is to look sophisticated. You don’t want to look like a dolt in front of your friends. So I’m using chopsticks to eat Cheetos.*
Cheetos are pretty much on the opposite end of the sophistication spectrum from sushi.** If you learn chopsticks to look suave in one of those swanky Japanese restaurants that’s one thing. You simply can’t look debonair eating bright orange cheese puffs. So why bother with the chopsticks? Aren’t they a finger food? They are if you don’t mind leaving blaze orange fingerprints everywhere.
Once you’ve determined you need to avoid orange gunk on your digits you’ve got to settle on an implement. Forks are inferior to chopsticks in this circumstance; neither the scooping action or the stabbing motion do you much good. Chopsticks, on the other hand, can pick up puffs one by one, with great accuracy. You’re rate-limited by the speed you chew in either case.
When you notice the pattern you see examples of it everywhere. @GaryMcVey gave us a description of an earlier version of color TV that never took off. And yet that finicky and expensive technology got sent to the moon. Because, however expensive it is, that cost pales against the great mass of rocket fuel you’d have to burn to launch it into orbit. Ever hear of gorilla glass? It was mostly an oddity until Steve Jobs was looking for something to use as an iPhone screen.
What can we learn from this? Couple lessons. First, the criteria used to judge which technology is superior is necessarily dependent on the background assumptions under which it’s evaluated. Secondly, and as a consequence of that, one ought to be constantly reevaluating the conditions under which those assumptions apply. Thirdly, to find one of these situations where the rejected line might actually be superior you have to reevaluate both the status quo and the alternatives. Which implies (fourthly) that the kind of guy who’s going to discover these opportunities to innovate is going to necessarily be familiar not just with the stuff that works, but the other things people have tried which don’t work.
And finally, I can learn how to use chopsticks by practicing on Cheetos. I mean, I don’t want to look like a yokel any more than I already do.
* I picked up this idea from someone in the PIT. Don’t rightly remember who, but I suspect @qoumidan . With the revolver.
** I bet if I made sushi out of cheetos, twinkies and Big Mac sauce… yeah, that’d be terrible. Further research is required.
Published in Science & Technology
I saw the same thing about table etiquette in general.
Are we also going to go back to the women and children eating the scraps after the men are done?
It’s funny, but eating sushi with chopsticks is totally an American thing. Sushi, as we know it today, was invented to be fast-food eaten with your fingers. And don’t even get a Japanese person started on the subject of that vile American habit of mixing wasabi into their soy-sauce. The most common response to which is “Bleh! That’s just a waste of fish.”
When I see someone eating sushi with chopsticks, it makes me think that it’s a bit like one of The Beverly Hillbillies lifting their pinky while sipping tea.
The Japanese started it, and we perfected it.
Yeah, I know, you’re ‘supposed to’ dip the fish end into a tiny bit of soy sauce and then maybe smear a bit of wasabi if you really have to. But let’s be honest, dunking sushi in spicy soy sauce tastes awesome.
Right, so use chopsticks.
Gravy usually has flour.
I’m sorry, I thought this was America.
Yes.
I thought women prepare the food? How will the men know we didn’t sneak some first?
Don’t get sassy, Missy. 😜
I, personally, can’t stand wasabi but I use WAY more soy-sauce than is ‘correct.’ I do however eat sushi with my fingers.
Ritual aids cohesion and is useful for non-verbal shibbolethery.
As a citizen of a tea-dumping country I have some sympathy with people who slam down their fork and yell, “your rules are stupid, I’m out!” I can’t help but wonder, though, whether the English aristocracy thought of our Declaration of Independence as virtue-signalling historical revisionism when it was first published.
See, I knew that all along. It’s just that it would be rude to disappoint Japanese onlookers by not committing the expected faux pas.
You are halfway to your geisha school diploma.
I have to admit here, I don’t eat sushi at all. Where I’m from, we call that bait.
You joke, but…
@hankrhody, did you provide the picture? I don’t remember its being there originally. Or did the editors go searching for pictures?
Okay, never mind. Just did a search. You are apparently not the first gent to cover this topic.
Whereas American and British chopsticks tend to be shaped like knives and forks. ;)
Yeah, the fold alone doesn’t seem to do the job; inevitably there’s some air leakage.
The truth of the matter is that my interest in eating cheetos is usually exhausted well before the end of the bag.
Sure, but real maple syrup is the good life. It’s like saying you can eat all the steak you want so long as it’s veggie burgers. Okay, not that far, but still.
Texan. “Mah fingers are sufficient for eatin’ barbecue, which is good enough for all y’all.”
This… this makes total sense.
I’ll admit I don’t put a very big premium on authenticity though. Wouldn’t hit the Asia Palace if I did.
…and I don’t intend to give the FBI any more help than I have to.
I did not provide the picture. To answer a question posed upthread, these are the dense and gnarly Cheetos I’m eating, not the puffs.
So, Medieval Times is the pinnacle of Woke?
Why do I feel like we are eves dropping on a old married couple with some of standard routine of grievances that need hashing every now and then.
They want us to go back to eating with our hands, walking instead of flying or driving, and using windmills instead of electricity. It doesn’t look to me like the “Progressives” like progress very much.
Ahh, then you want the Japanese style, better for stabbing.