Food & Drink: Chop, chop. Eat up

Two nations invented noodles, only one worked out how to eat them

I RAN OUT of excuses for not using chopsticks a long time ago, when the waiter at the old Lee Ho Fook in Gerrard Street simply said "no" to my request for a fork and spoon. It was my first office lunch after joining the J Walter Thompson advertising agency, in the days when one still had office lunches, and Graham, my art director, looked at me as if I had just landed from another planet.

I had two options. One, was to learn how to use chopsticks. The other was to starve. Back at the office that afternoon, Graham taught me the gentle art of chopsticks with the use of two Staedtler pencils and an Ormiston eraser. "When you can pick up the eraser and hold it over your head then put it back on the desk, my job will be done," he said in the gentle tones of a kung fu master. His job was done by about 4.15pm, although it must be said that picking up slippery little peanuts took another couple of years to master.

I realised that slim, elegant chopsticks make the knife and fork appear positively barbaric. Western cutlery stabs, slashes and pokes. It's clumsy and inefficient, necessitating the use of both hands at once.

Chopsticks, on the other hand, are practical, clean, portable, and personal. Chopsticks are smart, elegant and sophisticated. Chopsticks are the cutlery of the future. They are complete in themselves. One size fits all, with no need for fiddly little butter chopsticks, silly fish chopsticks, or stupid cocktail chopsticks.

Fai jee ("quick brothers") have been spearing and swooping on Chinese food for around 3,000 years, as the natural and practical solution to the problem of eating and sharing small morsels of food.

With a history of little fuel, little cooking oil, and many mouths to feed, food had to be cut into small pieces to enable fast cooking and easy sharing. Shovel the stuff in from a huge four-pronged fork and not only would the dish be gone in seconds, but every mouthful would taste more or less the same. Chopsticks enable a daintier, more delicate dining process, so that one mouthful can be a little chicken, the next a little carrot, the next a little rice.

Chopsticks do, however, come with their own set of responsibilities. Chopstick etiquette throughout Asian countries is as codified and pedantic as any Emily Post instruction about holding one's fish knife in a different manner from one's meat knife.

The higher one holds one chopsticks, the more elegant and nobly born one appears. Typically, the more elegant and nobly born among us also get more leverage. Crossed chopsticks signify poverty and evil - not a good look on any occasion. Rattling your chopsticks in your bowl means poverty will surely follow, as it will if you use them as batons for twirling or drum sticks for drumming. (I made up the last bit, because it annoys the hell out of me.)

At a banquet, you have to wait for your host or hostess to raise their chopsticks to signify the eating can begin. And you never leave your choppies sticking out of your rice bowl. In Japan, this means that somebody close to you has died. Probably of embarrassment.

Okay, so don't throw out the family silver just yet. Chopsticks aren't that hot for soft-boiled eggs, breakfast cereal, pizza, toast, grilled lamb chops and mashed potatoes - although they are fabulous for the accompanying peas. What does it say about the Italians, by the way, that both the Chinese and Italians invented noodles, but only one of them worked out how to eat them? Clearly, it's time Giorgio Armani designed olive green chopstick holders, and Dolce & Gabbana inserted chopstick pockets into their jackets. Then risotto, antipasti, and spaghetti could be eaten with style.

It is time we considered adopting chopsticks for most of our eating requirements. They are perfect for picking delicate leaves from a green salad, and for placing fresh oysters in the mouth. They're ideal for asparagus, paella, stews and casseroles, and make fruit salads a breeze to eat. I dream of a future in which we all speak softly and carry two small sticks.