How do you eat with chopsticks?

[sixdogs]

This is on my bucket list and something I've wanted to try for years. Some say you just scoop food out like a shovel but I've seen people pick food up with them. Anyone know?

 

[square1]

Once in my life I witnessed someone raised eating with chopsticks. He shoveled, he did not pick.

 

[Egon]

Oh yes, individual pieces can be picked up. Just takes practice.

There are different methods used for different foods.

 

[phiferpharm]

Here ya go, sorta like training wheels for chopsticks....

 

[Gary Fowler]

Only the Chinese would come up with that eating utensil. Of course at the time the Chinese were being sanitary with their chopsticks, everyone else was just using their hands and/or their dagger to eat with. In my youth, I tried to use them with limited success. My fingers are too stiff to even try now.

 

[jmc]

Around here, there are many Asian restaurants where even Caucasians have to ask for silverware. Recently, a young Asian woman at an adjacent table was amazingly deft with hers. I tried to discreetly watch to see how she was holding them but she may have interpreted my attention as impure.

 

[Slowpoke Slim]

Are you sure you were staring at her chopsticks?

:laughing:

 

[jmc]

Are you sure you were staring at her chopsticks?

:laughing:

I was, but they were between the plate and her chin.

 

[Slowpoke Slim]

It will be hard to explain holding them without pictures, I'll try to dig some up later (or I may just wing it with a pair of pencils)

The "lower" chopstick is cradled in your last thumb joint and rests near the tip of your curved middle finger. The lower chopstick doesn't move, or do any of the "picking", it just sits there. It also sticks out slightly farther than the upper chopstick.

The "upper" chopstick is held loosely between the thumb tip and index finger tip. This is the one that does all the work. Yes you can pick individual items off of a plate, or out of a bowl with chopsticks. The "shoveling" is done for more loose foods like rice, or noodles. Also, rice for chopstick eating (as in traditional rice) is cooked to be sticky and clump together in small balls of rice. Makes it easy to eat with chopsticks. It's us fork-using Americans that don't cook our rice "correctly" that make it hard to eat with chopsticks.

I'll try to dig up some pictures holding chopsticks off the interwebs.

 

[Slowpoke Slim]

This is how I was taught to use chopsticks.

Stationed on Okinawa, about a million years ago...