–Steps out in Octopus costume–
Woman on bed: “Uh - what the fuck is that?”
Muffled voice in costume: “What? You see it in anime all the time. It’s a normal thing.”
I used to take chopsticks with me to the neighborhood bar where we went to buy pitchers and they offered all the free, overly-salted popcorn you could eat. Taking just one piece at a time kept me from overindulging. (And could be a conversation-starter, too.)
Exactly, same here. It’s a different style of eating completely and ideal for Asian food. Last night I went to a Japanese place which had uni soba as their specialty – cold soba noodles with a dipping sauce, topped with delicate ikura and plenty of very fresh uni. Eating that would have been difficult to impossible with a fork, the uni would get mushed, the ikura eggs would either pop or be hard to chase around the bowl, the noodles would slip off. But chopsticks? Perfect and gentle.
Incidentally, Steve Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature has a lengthy bit looking at the correlations between dining habits and societal violence. Apparently, there’s a pretty strong correlation between homicide rates and “do people use bladed weapons to eat with?”.
It also has an effect on dentistry; when you compare medieval European skulls to modern ones, a striking difference is that almost all modern Europeans have an overbite, while on medieval skulls the incisors are worn down so that the teeth match up without one. The use of chopsticks and pre-cut food may be responsible for the old racist caricatures of buck-toothed asians; from a pre-modern European POV, any sort of overbite would’ve looked weird.
That’s totally fascinating, I want to read more about this! The history of food & culture is one of my favorite subjects.
I remember seeing text from a news article printed about the time of the Transcontinental Railroad, where Chinese workers were working alongside Americans, and the newspaper genuinely saw them as aliens. The article spoke about these strange yellow people with buck teeth, conical hats, hair in queues, and odd clothing who spoke ‘moon language’ and ate “soybean cheese” with sticks.
I realized that I was ‘fluent’ in chopsticks the day I found I could use the big, round, blunt, plastic chopsticks in a Hong Kong lunch place to eat the snack that they served when they seated you: slippery, fried peanuts.
chorks are blowing up this month
Something, something, Samsung now making chorks, something.
When in Rome…
Sooo hungry now… cursing nungesser for tantalizing with things I can’t get here…
I was surprised to find it here! My previous experience with uni have been of the “low tide” variety. The fresh stuff was kind of a revelation.
I will say that it’s very weird to eat something like that in a state of bliss while everyone else at the table thinks what you’re eating is the most grody disgusting thing they can imagine. I get that “am I an alien for enjoying this?” feeling.
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