Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/08/website-all-about-eating-utens.html
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@pesco
Need to fix the comments link to:
[Website all about eating utensils](Boing Boing BBS Link)
Also I was expecting a link describing the purpose of each unique item, much like a pictorial reference of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eating_utensils
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Not what I was expecting with a headline “website all about eating utensils”. My mind went elsewhere.
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Yeah. I thought if I get to the point where I’m eating utensils, things are really dire.
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The site (which is, indeed, quite nice, and reminiscent of the early web) mentions runcible spoons by name without description. The Guardian has this:
Q: The owl and the pussycat ‘dined upon mince/and slices of quince/which they ate with a runcible spoon’. What is a runcible spoon?
A: MANY of Edward Lear’s poems have nonsensical references to his daily life. The ‘runcible’ spoon was Lear’s way of teasing his friend, George Runcy. Runcy had very modern views (for his day) on bringing up children and believed, among other things, that they should be encouraged to feed themselves as early as possible. To this end George Runcy designed a spoon that had the hollow part for food curved towards the handle at 90 , thereby enabling the child to insert the spoon into its mouth end-on, without having to bend its wrist. This made eating with the spoon much easier and Runcy used the spoon to teach all of his children to eat. This type of spoon can still be bought in department stores, but George Runcy, to my knowledge, was never credited with its invention.
– Merlin Shepherd, Penarth, S Glamorgan
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My favorite utensil is the telescoping olive fork - on top of being functional, it reminds me of Roadrunner cartoons.
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When you think about it, it probably helped the owl and the pussycat as well, for the lack of opposable thumbs. 
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That shit reminds me of the movie Seven, and not in a good way!
Made me laugh!
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I never doubted the existence of the runcible spoon, although I had no idea what it was. But I did think quince was fanciful and imaginary, until I saw my south american relations eating it from a can, which delighted me. I immediately asked for a runcible spoon so I could try it, but they must not have had a proper education in Argentina, and didn’t understand me.
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That call out about the straws could have been written by my brother, Dr WB Hafford, archeologist at U Penn Museum (former). His specialty in Near East studies include many, many years in the field digging on site at Ur, where some of these Sumerian and earlier straws were discovered. His research transcribing the early field notes of Wooley, et al, coupled with intensive in field observations have added immensely to the ongoing discoveries of the museum, its staff and graduate students at Penn.
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