Frequently asked questions: how to eat with chopsticks?
- Manipulating two sticks of bamboo – or another material – to lever food into your mouth can’t be that hard, can it? Audrey Chan offers a step-by-step guide
- Chopstick users can be divided into ‘pincers pinchers’ and ‘scissors pinchers’, according to scholars. Once you get the technique, chopstick etiquette is next
Dining with chopsticks for the first time can be quite a handful, but that hasn’t stopped them becoming one of the most widely used utensils for eating.
How to eat with chopsticks? Use your thumbs, index fingers and middle fingers to manipulate them – practice makes perfect.
Basic technique
The use of chopsticks as a means to eat began in China some 2,500 years ago. Since then, their use has become common across East Asia.
While each country has adapted the shape of chopsticks and the material from which they are made to suit its culture, there isn’t much divergence in how they are used. Two dominant ways of holding chopsticks prevail.
A paper published in the Journal of Physiological Anthropology described these two methods as the “traditional pincers-pinching mode” and the “scissors-pinching mode”. Both techniques are effective, but the former is more customary, the researchers explained. Here’s how to get a grip on both.
First, make sure the thinner ends of your chopsticks are pointing away from your hand, and that they’re perfectly parallel to start with.
