How to Eat Food

Not to sound like Martha Stewart but being here has made me aware of the different styles of using utensils while eating. I hope this doesn't get too boring but I need to set a bit of background. Most everyone is familiar with what I guess would be called the North American and Continental/European styles. The formal North American style would typically mean holding your fork in the hand you write with. When cutting you would switch hands and hold the knife in your writing hand, cut your food and then switch the fork back to the writing hand to bite. The Continental style is common in America but is the less formal; typically holding the fork, tines down, in the non-writing hand with the knife in your writing hand where the cutting and eating of food is done with utensils staying the same hand.

I have noticed two interesting derivations of the Continental style since coming to Prague. I find that many Americans, when using the Continental style will sometimes move the fork back to the writing hand to scoop up food while many Europeans I have eaten lunch with will keep the fork tines down and carefully push a portion of vegetable, potato, or whatever up onto the rounded section of the fork and get the full bite from there. This requires a bit of practice and patience to get the food properly balanced before moving to your mouth and it sometimes seems to me it would be easier to just switch hands, turn the fork over and scoop up a lot of food.

Well, there is also a Czech derivation of the Continental style which I suppose solves the challenge of balancing food on rounded top of a downward facing fork. I have noticed that most Czechs will keep the knife in the writing hand, the fork in the other but instead of keeping the fork tines down will actually just use the fork tines up but in the non-writing hand. Personally, I dont think I could just use my fork in this tines-up manner but in the "wrong" hand. There seems to be an advanced version of this whereby you keep the fork tines down to get a good cut on the food, and then with a bit of slight of hand you quickly turn the fork over, keeping it in your non-writing hand and use the fork as a scoop, with a bit of help from the knife. It seems not everyone is capable of this advanced style but I see it pretty frequently and find myself impressed with the dexterity required to pull that off.