Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Chopsticks

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why chopsticks are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Chopsticks. Known for being utensils. Famous for being East Asian. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why chopsticks are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Hey there, Cipelopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is.

My name is Alex Schmidt. I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie! Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of chopsticks? Well, Alex, I have about a hundred of them. So I love... Is it for your 50s?

Fifty hands? Is that what you're doing? Yes, I am a nautilus, a nautoloid, and I have many, many arms. I love the foods that generally you eat with chopsticks. And I know how to use chopsticks, and I happily use them. But I do not like the mouth feel of the takeout chopsticks. and um take out like the disposable wooden snap apart yes yeah because like the nice chopsticks or the or the wood that has been you know like polished so that it's like smooth type thing they're great they're nice

yeah specifically the cheap takeout chopsticks it like kind of rubs against my teeth in my mouth in a way that i don't love whenever i have an option to say like don't put any chopsticks in because i don't want to waste stuff. I do that, but often you don't get that option. So I have been collecting the cheap chopsticks thinking that maybe I'll use them for something at some point. We have a box of all sorts of disposable takeout stuff. It's delusional. I'm never, I don't know what I could possibly, like am I going to host a dinner party where I'm going to give everyone disposable chopsticks? Probably not. Like, and here's that. And here's that. plastic fork that snaps in half immediately if you try to use it.

I don't know. I still don't know what to do with my collection of the wooden chopsticks that I did not ask for. And I don't know what to do with. There's like a community refrigerator in our town and we just kind of give batches of that stuff once in a while. Because it builds up and we don't use it. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to look it up because that would be amazing. I have like and I'm you know because I keep them all nice and tidy us too they're so neat yeah yeah

and just like like and here's here are my hundreds of chopsticks that I don't use and I don't know what to do with but I certainly don't want to throw them out because that's a waste right I don't know these are it's a tool yeah yeah and I for me I did not really grow up with chopsticks and I have learned a hand posture and form where I I'm pretty effective at using them, but it's completely improvised and messy. And then my wife, Brenda, her parents are from China, and she grew up using chopsticks in, like, a proper way, essentially. Right. And pointed out at one point, like, hey, maybe you should kind of learn chopsticks for him and be less rude. And I was like, you're right. But then also, as we talked about that, the idea of ways it's similar to the form for using a fork or spoon came up. Turns out I use a fork in a bonkers fashion.

And I am now... Oh, really? We've found a video for me that's intended for toddlers. Ah. To show me how to use a fork right? Because I just never learned to be polite with that either. I'm just a monster of utensil posture. Can you demonstrate for me your former fork holding?

It's hard to describe, but basically the stabbing motion. And also with forks, people have said, hold it like you hold a pencil. I also hold a pencil weird. I have zero discipline with everything you put in your hand. I used to hold a pencil weird and I started to get a callus in elementary school. And so I kind of like got corrected. Yeah, mine's still fist-ish for a pencil. So I have a lot to learn about politeness in society.

Right. And one element is chopsticks. And also thank you to listeners Ginnik Gname. and also what's Paul playing today for suggesting this on the Discord, support from lots of folks in the polls. And it's a wonderful topic for SIF. On most episodes we lead with fascinating numbers and statistics, this week I want to do a few takeaways first about like fundamentals of this, where it comes from and stuff. We're switching it up. Switching it up.

Because yeah, just the fundamentals are amazing to think about on their own before we get numerical. And that starts with takeaway number one. Chopsticks originated in China as a secondary utensil for eating stew. Oh, interesting. It turns out these were like a sidekick to spoons for a lot of history. And then eventually new foods came along where it flipped a bit. I mean, that is still one of their functions, right? Like if you're eating Chinese soups or you're eating Japanese ramen, like you do use both

chopsticks and the spoon. So that's like still people have probably experienced kind of what that was like. Yeah. Yeah. And that's part of why some East Asian cuisines you'll be provided a different spoon than say a United States spoon where it's a big long metal rod and then a scoop on the end. Like it might be more of a porcelain kind of rounded item. And it's because there's many thousands of years of specific and dominant spoons in Chinese cuisine. I mean, I've always found them. The ones that you get usually with the soup's good because it is the right size to be able to get chunks in there with some broth. It is.

It's great for all sorts of things. So that's how basically these two items develop side by side, chopsticks and spoons. Yeah. And there's also a long ago SIF episode about spoons where we talk about those being the first utensil kind of globally for eating food. So this is one of many cases of that. I was amazed to learn how it specifically led to chopsticks. And one key source for the whole episode is a book. It's called Chopsticks, A Cultural and Culinary History, that's by historian Kew Edward Wong,

who is Professor of History and Coordinator of Asian Studies at Rowan University. Also, this takeaway leans on food writing for serious eats.com by Genevieve Yam, and a piece for the New York Times by Amy Chin. Chopsticks exist at all because they were initially a kitchen tool And then later became a tool for individual eaters like a utensil So like tongs kind of Basically yeah like our oldest finds of chopsticks go back very far in history The finds are from about 7,000 years ago and were made of animal bones

But the thing is they were bigger than most modern chopsticks There will be numbers within these takeaways. One of them is about 25 centimeters. 25 centimeters or about 10 inches is a typical length of a modern chopstick for a diner in China and Vietnam. They're a little shorter in Korea, shorter in Japan. But the earliest finds are just bigger, even though they're really crafted and smoothed and supposed to be the length they are. And it's because we think it was kind of a tongs or a whisk for making bigger meals.

Okay, yeah, that makes sense. And they continue to be a highly useful kitchen item for all sorts of tasks like that. Actually, I'm going to think of it. I do use chopsticks actually as kitchen utensils, like especially for like leveling things. So it's like a good level. Yeah. It's nice. They are.

Yeah. They're just very good for all sorts of things like that. And also a lot of these finds are specifically in northern China, the most ancient 7,000-year-old chopsticks. And so that was mainly a kitchen item in a early era where the single dominant utensil for a Neolithic Chinese meal and New Stone Age Chinese meal was the spoon. And quoting Edward Wong, more precisely, it was a dagger-shaped spoon known as B in Chinese. And quote, my pronunciations are not amazing that transliterates the Latin letters B and I with the third tone over the letter I. the bee made of bone is a very long and pointed almost dagger-like spoon so it lets you scoop things and also cut a little bit it looks a little bit like a letter opener to me like it's uh you know not yeah it's definitely not

like stabbing your knife but it's got that pointed edge to it totally and it's partly a function of bones of animals being long rather than wide usually and so also slightly curved so like if you take a piece of the bone, all you have to do is sort of take a particular tapered cross section of a bone and you'll get that shape. Yeah. Simple tool to make and incredibly useful for all sorts of foods and a really good way to go. What happened next to generate chopsticks? There was basically a dominant spoon culture. And then our theory comes from a few scholars. Edward Wong cites one in particular named Hachiro Ishiki. Japanese historian. His theory is that globally people were trying to eat two types of food

and came up with three approaches for handling the two types of food. It's a lot of numbers, but don't worry about it. Basically, the two types are grains and non-grains. And so grains, it's stuff like bowls of porridge and cereals and stuff that you want to spoon for. And then the non-grains are pieces of meat, vegetables. And also, I don't love the names they pick for this, because that also includes stuff like noodles, which are often made of grains. But the point is just a spoon is not the thing for it. Yeah. If you've ever tried to eat spaghetti with a spoon, it doesn't work well.

I'm like, I sure know that I revealed my shirt is just covered in tomato sauce. And I'm like, yeah. As all this developed, basically people said, I have a spoon because that's the first utensil every human culture is made. what other utensils do I want for the other category of food? And in the combination of Asia, Africa, Europe, people came up with three ideas. One of them is a fork and a knife. Usually they'd think of knives first, and then as they were using sort of paired knives, they developed a fork. Right.

Yeah, you know, something to stab, something to saw and something to stab. Makes sense. Yeah. And that ended up remaining dominant in places with a lot of meat. in the cuisine, especially Europe, because you might have a lot of slicing to do on your plate. Another big way of eating, this is in a lot of South Asia, a lot of the Middle East, a lot of places like Ethiopia in East Africa, people developed advanced food ways of using their fingers to eat, just directly as utensils, their fingers. You can totally eat foods like

biryani's with your fingers. And a lot of people who develop those cuisines primarily ate them with their fingers before maybe other groups of people used other utensils for it. Those folks eating with their hands also helped spark traditions of thin breads like chappati or like injera. Those breads can be used to both pick up foods and also add another component to what goes into your mouth. And so the cultures that focused on using their fingers to eat And also developed all sorts of food-based utensils that are still in the fingers and get eaten. It's not universal what the kind of bread is, but I think in some cuisines it can be kind of like spongy. Yeah, yeah.

So that you can, it can like absorb liquids as well as you use it as a scooper for the solid. So you're mixing sort of the liquid food and the solid food with the spongy bread, which is just, it's like an edible utensil. Exactly. Yeah, that's a huge feature of. it and totally distinct from a fork and knife in terms of the foods you want it for and the experience you get. We do that to some extent in Western cuisine, but we just kind of like categorize it differently, I guess.

I'm not really sure, like where we're like using one food to pick up another food. Yeah. And I also, I love this broad set of theories because they include the fact that all of these cultures thought of all of the ideas. And then just some of them became more or less. dominant because the third idea that became most popular in East Asia and originated in China is chopsticks. And in particular, because they had a major non-grained meal of stews. Right.

Which it literally includes some grains as ingredients, but it's vegetables, meats, and stuff like millet all boiled and cooked together. Millet is very tiny grains that usually turn into a porridge type thing when you cook it. Right. Also within Chinese food history, there's a broad divide between north and south. Two big things to kind of maybe take out of one's head imagining thousands of years ago Chinese food is, especially in North China, they didn't really have plentiful access to rice. It took all the way until around the 600s AD in the Tang Dynasty for northern China to start to have new rice varieties that can handle a drier climate and to focus on rice cultivation. And they're mostly eating more millet porridgees with

some meat and vegetables in it. And the other thing is they developed forks and knives as early as everybody else. Edward Wong says that these Neolithic sites, you do find knives and forks along with early kitchen chopsticks and stuff, but then knives and forks kind of drop off in the records after that because it was a very active choice that chopsticks are useful and awesome. It wasn't just that nobody thought of alternatives. hopefully not as much anymore but yeah definitely something that I feel like was kind of a I don't really have anything specific to sight but I remember it being sort of like

racist jokes about like the fact that you know chopsticks being seen as being more simple than knives and forks which it's like not really because the mechanics of using chopsticks is more is trickier than knives and forks but it's all also like the idea being that like oh they couldn't even come up with knives and force it's like no they did yes and obviously they also have knives because they can get things like it's not they don't they don't they don't which is i actually did i was going to ask because like generally in the west like you might get like a big chunk of meat right like that's a big big side of mutton just kind of plonked down in front of you

we either like maybe would just use our mouths and our hands before knives and forks but then like when knives and forks cut on more universally like you use your knife and your fork to cut up the meat which unless the meat's super tender you can't really use chopsticks to cut meat up but usually the experience is

like that when you're at a restaurant at least Like, everything's already pre-cut, so you don't need, you don't need a knife because everything's already sliced up completely for you. Was that, like, a thing, like, as chopsticks would come about? Was it, like, cutting up things such that they're not so big that you can't use your chopsticks, just part of, like, meal preparation in general? Yeah, and apparently it came from a few things because, especially in North China thousands of years ago, they're tending to make stew because they wanted to assemble a lot of different

things. Also, they might have been short on amounts of meat. And so the meat just seems to go further if it's within a dish rather than a giant mutton. And then you eat it all and you're like, that was my whole meal? That's it? Because you would become a small mutton, maybe. And then also there were traditions, both practical and cultural, of just not putting knives on tables. Apparently, there are writings by Confucius where he says you're not supposed to have a knife on your table at all. Not that he's in charge of everyone in China, but there was just an overall practice both culturally and practically of knives are for the kitchen and you chop everything up in the kitchen before serving it. What was the sort of the reasoning for that? Was it seen as

uncouth to like have a knife, the idea being like, well, you know, that should be part of kitchen preparation or is it that like a knife is sort of like, ah, you know, we're eating together, having knives around seems a little aggressive. It's a little of both apparently, yeah. Okay. And then also down the line, people developed wonderful stir frying techniques where it makes sense to break up all the meat, even if you have plenty of meat and even if you are comfortable with knives being around.

That's just the best for that kind of dish. So it was a lot of things all at once and over time. And I know that maybe sounds fuzzy. two listeners, but most cultural things are. It's just, there's not like a Thomas Edison of no knives on tables who I can date, you know? Yeah. I mean, here's something for you, like, I guess, like, to make it relatable as Americans.

In America, when you get a pizza, if you go to a restaurant, you can get a pizza or you order a pizza, it is sliced, most likely. Or, like, certainly if you go to, like, a restaurant and you get a pizza, they slice it for you. Usually, yeah, usually it's all pre-sliced. Usually it's only like certain types of deliveries or the homemade pizza where you need to use a pizza cutter. In Italy, that is not guaranteed to be the case. Often, you'll get a pizza and it is not sliced at all and you use a fork and a knife to slice it. So when we have visitors here, they are sometimes do not know what to do.

we'll get the pizza out and they'll like look at us like helplessly like what but it's not like how am I supposed to eat they should use office supply scissors like Sylvester Stallone in the movie Cobra that's what they should do I've tried okay so I have legitimately tried not office supply scissors but kitchen scissors because you're Sylvester Stallone I understand yeah because I'm Sylvester Salon you're wearing a black t-shirt and sunglasses what are you going to do about but like I uh but I we don't have like a pizza roller. So I tried to use scissors. Didn't work very well either. Here in Italy, you, you slice the pizza. And that's just, it's just a, it's just the, and both cultures have forks and knives and pizza slicers. So it's not even a difference of utensils. It's

just a difference of cultural expectation. Yeah, you can kind of use any utensil for anything if you just decide to do it that way. And that's a little bit how chopsticks became completely dominant, not just that they're useful, but that a few steps happened here. Basically, what happened is, especially in North China, people are eating stews and their utensil is a spoon. And then people said, hey, it would be nice to have another utensil for picking out specific meats and vegetables as I eat this. And so the next development in standard North Chinese utensils is additional shapes of spoons and one secondary. personal chopsticks. Because it's not a technological leap. You just make them smaller than the

kitchen tool. Right, right. Because, yeah, they already had the big ones. So you just make them smaller for the dinner table. And then by around the Han Dynasty, which is from the 200s BC to the 200s AD, it's about 2,000 years ago. By around the Han Dynasty, all of China, there's a relatively standard utensil set for a person eating, which is at least one spoon and then a pair of chopsticks that are kind of secondary and kind of a sidekick. And then people develop lots of other dishes, in particular noodles. Noodles. It's easy to forget that noodles are kind of recent.

We think that they developed later in the Han Dynasty in China for kind of the first time as a major food and a culture in the world. Right. And so what was the base for the noodles? Was it like rice flour? Were they using different types of flowers? All of the above, like all sorts of grains, but especially rice and later after the Han Dynasty, wheat really gets going, too. Right, right.

Yeah. And there's even a legend about a specific pharmacist being the Thomas Edison of noodles in the 100s AD. That's probably not true. But either way, noodles were a big hit food. Spoon doesn't make sense. And you're sitting down with just a spoon and chopsticks, you say, well, chopsticks's great. Yeah. Like this previous secondary stew tool is now your noodle tool.

Right. And then that also becomes the key tool for dumplings, bow, sesame pancakes, any sorts of other dishes that develop as time goes on. Oh, man, you just reminded me of sesame pancakes. They're so good, yeah. So like chopsticks, that's how they become very famous. Like apparently there are medieval texts in. Turquier in Turkey that describe chopsticks to Turkish readers as a specific utensil for pasta and noodles.

That was their conception that they exist for eating that because they basically rose from semi-obscurity as a secondary stew tool to being a primary tool for these new foods and these exciting dishes. Yeah, chopsticks are really good for noodles. I feel like forks, it's always a little bit of a change. because you have to do the spinny thing. Yeah. So forks versus chopsticks with noodle eating, they both have their strengths and their weaknesses,

and it probably depends on, I think definitely for like noodles that are in a soup, the chopsticks are better. Whereas like for a pasta, yeah, the fork can be pretty good. That's my hot take. Four noodles, both chopsticks and forks came to that. as sort of a we already have this item situation. Right, right. Because like forks were for holding down meat that you're slicing with a knife personally.

Right. And then pasta begins to make its way to say, Europe. And people said, I already have forks. Right. We just got to make it work. This makes more sense than a whole new industry for a pasta tool. Right. And that's also a lot of why forks dropped off in East Asia is that if you have a bowl of stew,

you're like hunting with a fork if you're trying to pick up stuff. Chopsticks are way better. And then the further rise of chopsticks was cemented probably more than a thousand years ago, but especially through rice becoming common across all of China and some of the rice are glutenous stick together. Others, it's easy to pick up smaller bits with chopsticks still. Yeah, rice is gluten-free, but glutinous rice just means it's sticky. Yeah, exactly, yeah.

And then the other thing is the tradition of communal eating really gets going partly thanks to chopsticks already being on all the tables because you can pick from a central plate very skillfully with chopsticks very easily. Yeah. Yeah. And even during concerns about pandemic germs, there is the COVID pandemic of the 2020s. There were other outbreaks of diseases like tuberculosis in China and the 1930s. In those situations, people tended to pivot to. a separate set of serving chopsticks on tables rather than some kind of different utensils or different eating setup. So chopsticks even work in that situation. Right. Yeah, it really depends

on how discreet the food items are, like, if it's sort of like bok choy, that's, it's kind of hard to like do it with it, like get just a distinct one because your chopsticks are going to be touching other stuff. But if it's like picking up individual dumplings, you're usually not going to cross-contaminate. I've clearly thought about this before. Very low-level germaphobe, very low-level. I'm usually pretty chill. And this is also one thing that's impacted chopstick design and size in different cultures, because in a country like China, there's been a dominant tradition of communal eating. In a country like Japan, there's been much more of a tradition of individualized meals. And so that's part of why chopsticks are a bit shorter in

Japan is that you're not expecting to be reaching out across a table for food. Yeah. And you also might be packing them up in a bento box. So there's shorter chopsticks there really entirely for that reason. Huh. It feels like there would be a saying about that. I'm unaware of any such saying. But, you know, that feels ripe for some kind of like pithy statement on like, you know,

the longer the chopsticks, the closer your neighbors or whatever. I don't know. Yeah, write in, folks, if you have exciting sayings, please. Write in if you have sayings. And also, speaking of Japan, we have another takeaway about the development of all this, which is takeaway number two. Disposable chopsticks might have been invented more than 1,000 years ago by construction workers building Japanese palaces.

Wild. That's really cool. Yeah, apparently we're sure that the mainstream restaurant disposable chopsticks were invented in Japan in the 1700s AD. And then there's a pretty strong theory that about 1,000 years before that in the 700s AD, Japanese construction workers kind of prototyped it. Yeah, amazing. Because they had a bunch of scrap wood. Right, right. So, you know, you got it. Which is awesome.

I wonder if those were any better in terms of mouth feel. of modern disposable chopsticks. It's like, man, I really, I can do it. If it's the only option, I'll do it for sure. That's good. Yeah, it can be done. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Was there a certain type of wood they would use, or it was just any sort of kind of scrap wood that they would use in construction? Yeah, it tended to be just whatever solid wood they were using to build the beams and structures of palaces in the 700s. That was the start of it. And a couple key sources to bring in. Additional of the previous ones are a piece for KUER, Utah Public Radio, by University of Utah Professor Nalini Nad Carney, and also an NPR piece by reporter Anthony Kuhn.

This is mostly based on digs at the historical sites of palaces in the 700s in Japan. People have found a lot of discarded pieces of wood that seem to have been hastily and on the fly carved into chopsticks. and if so, those could be the first disposable chopsticks in the world. Because apparently one element of the rise of chopsticks across East Asia is that you can easily turn scrapwood or loose branches into chopsticks if you just whittle a little bit. Yeah, harder to whittle a fork. Yes.

And so we think that as there was some really significant palace construction in the the 700s AD in Japan, construction workers took scrapwood, made that into chopsticks, and also were not precious about them because there's always new scrapwood. Plenty of wood in the wood pile, and it does grow on trees. Yes, yeah, yeah. And there's also, yeah, the other way of stories of people just like being hungry, breaking a stick off a tree and snapping or whittling that into chopsticks on the spot. Yeah.

And you can just do it. It's fantastic. Man, that's cool. I would... It's really cool. I want to be able to just, like, pull, like, a fork off of a tree and use it immediately. Did you know that? Like, this reminds me of, like, so, like, you know, like, disposable cups have been around for at least, like, 5,000 years.

That's awesome. There's this tradition of creating disposable clay cups, so they're really simple to make. And, like, you watch these potters making them, and they're just doing, like, a cup every few seconds. It's crazy. I mean, it takes an immense amount of skill to be able to just like, and here's a cup, and here's a cup, and here's a cup, and here's a cup. And they're made out of a thin clay, they're unglazed, and so they just, like, you serve, like, hot drinks in it, and because it's unglazed, the drink kind of like seeps into the clay, and you get a little bit of clay taste, but, like, people like that, because it's, like, kind of gives it a specific taste. But, yeah, it's really just a single use. Like, if you did a repeated use, they'd kind of break down because they're very thin and they're not glazed.

So they're not really designed for repeated use. So they're Dixie cups made out of clay and they've been around for thousands of years. We love disposable stuff. It's great. Yeah. It's been thrilling across history to be able to chuck stuff. It's great in certain ways. I would say, like, for, I think obviously.

Also, I've never heard of trash or pollution, so don't tell me about it. I mean, for like things made out of clay and wood, it's like, they're biodegradable. So you could, I feel like make a case for that. Like, obviously, I should just bring like a fork and knife made out of metal with me everywhere and be that person. Speaking of different materials, the other reason we think that these palace construction workers were the first people to make disposable chopsticks in the world is. that they were some of the first Japanese people using chopsticks. Because in Japan and pretty much every other culture that has adopted chopsticks, it happened because of their specific relationship to China.

China is really, to me, surprisingly almost the fundamental country of spreading chopsticks. I thought it would have kind of been parallel invented more or parallel built up more. In Japan, there's a key date of the years 607 AD and 608 AD, when the Japanese Empress Suiko sent an official long-term envoy to the court of China's emperor as a learn-about Chinese culture mission that led to more than a dozen official missions across the 600s through the 800s. They were also nicknames Tairi Kufu, where Japanese words literally meaning mainland winds. And the idea was we're just trying to absorb everything we can about China's language writing, religion, food, everything. Also, folks have heard the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil episode that's

involved in that. Like Buddhist monks went to Japan and the 700s. And then one thing that came out of that is Japan got into chopsticks right around when these construction workers are starting to work. I see, I see. So like it's something that the courts are learning from China. You have all these construction workers working on palaces, and then they're, it's like, you hear about these chopsticks? Yes. And so, yeah, that's very top-down that way in Japan. And in China, the most common materials for chopsticks were wood or bamboo. Japan is heavily forested, not so much bamboo. And so wood becomes the dominant material there. And then about a thousand years later, probably separate inspiration, restaurants in Japan start offering customers Wari Bashi.

The name means split chopsticks. And it's pretty much what you'd get in any disposable chopsticks situation. The amazing number there is modern estimate of about 80 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks are made per year. 80 billion. Because some people are using them every day, right? Or most days. So it adds up. Are they recycle? Because like they're made out of wood. And the packaging is paper, so it seems like all of that can be recycled. Yeah, the paper easily ends. There are apparently some startups trying to get the wood recycling going. But broadly, they end up in landfills, unfortunately.

I mean, that's not great, but also it's biodegradable. So it's like not as bad as plastic. Yeah, yeah. And so ideally they'd become mulch or something. And there's people doing like carpentry out of them and things. Right, right. And in the bonus show, we'll talk. about a reverse of this where chopsticks are helping reforest something.

Ooh. But ironically, parts of Japan were deforested in the past few centuries, and now they get most of their disposable ones from China, Southeast Asia, Canada, and the United States. Right, right. Where we have more trees still. Right. And then other cultures had other relationships to China and received chopsticks other ways. One of the earliest adopters was Vietnam.

Partly because way back in the time of the Yellow Emperor Chin Shi Wang, he sent some of his generals to establish military control in what's now North Vietnam. And then they were still in power while Chin Chi Wang's regime fell apart. And so then they set up independent kingdoms with close ties to South China. And so then Vietnamese cuisine matched South Chinese cuisine in a lot of ways, especially because rice and fish were the big grain and non-grain. And all that works well with chopsticks. So they became an early chopstick adapter.

So rice was not necessarily indigenous to Vietnam. They imported it from China and started growing it there? It developed both places. And apparently some varieties developed in Vietnam helped popularize it to the north because they were drought resistant. Right, right. And then meanwhile in Korea, there was a time called the Three Kingdoms period, starting in about 2,000 years ago, lasting more than 600 years.

And that time is when they received chopsticks because culturally Korean people were in three separate kingdoms that were all fighting with each other and all tried to get help from the large Chinese empire nearby to get a leg up on each other. And so that led to a lot of Chinese influence and chopstick adoption. And then also Korea had huge metal mining operations and advanced metalworking and not so much wood or bamboo. So that led to a metal chopstick tradition. Nice. And Korea remains the big metal

chopstick country. Yeah. I definitely prefer the metal to the disposable wood, but it's still the temperature sometimes. Like if it's really cold, it hurts my little teeth. That can be a thing. Yeah, yeah.

But so, I like how you're like telling all this really interesting history. I'm like, yeah, but the way my mouth feels is the most important thing to keep bringing up. That's really, so like, what are the, so like you have, you have China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea. Obviously, like, chopsticks are used globally now, but in terms of, like, where that is the primary utensil, like, are those all the countries, or are there other countries that primarily use

chopsticks? That's a good question, because those countries are the dominant ones, and then people from those countries have also spread them other places. And one good example of an in-between culture is Mongolia, because in the 1,200s A.D., Mongolian people started conquering and interacting with China, which led to some chopstick adoption. But by the 1200s A.D., there was a pretty strong tradition of fork and knife use in Mongolia. So those folks tended to adopt a utensil set of forks and knives and chopsticks. Yeah.

It's interesting following these theories from Edward Wong's book and other peopley sites where there are pretty solid, distinctive eating the non-grain utensil traditions and then also all kinds of bleeding over. It seems like it's not just that the food itself lends itself well to the chopsticks, but also it just depends on sort of these like historical events where you'd have. of influence from other cultures, because otherwise you could probably, you know, use other utensils. You can argue about which is best with similar food, but you'll find a way, but it's just

kind of the relationship between countries and culture that also, in addition to it, making sense with the food. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's a completely useful utensil that is mostly a cultural choice at this point. Because you can get whatever utensil. Yeah. Especially these countries adjacent to China and cultures adjacent to China. That's the main places it's been adopted because in a way that surprised me is really fundamentally sparked by especially North China.

Yeah. And with all that, there's also one more takeaway about this history, which is takeaway number three. One Chinese king has been criticized for using ivory chopsticks for 3,000 years. Wow. Wait, so people didn't like them using them at the time? Yeah, this is, there's some lore about specific, very luxurious materials being used as chopsticks in ways that loom large in culture. And the final king of the Shang Dynasty has been basically held up as an example of decadence. And ivory chopsticks are the big symbol. I see. Yeah, I mean, you know,

It's not, ivory does not grow in trees. It does grow in elephants. Yes. As they say, as the saying goes. Yeah, Edward Wong talks about how part of what popularized chopsticks is that wood or bamboo ones were the most common one in China for all classes of people. It just made sense. Yeah. And if you wanted metal ones because they last longer or something, that also made sense and was not seen as decadent.

But the Shang Dynasty ended with a king who ruled from 11,005 BC to 146 BC, so more than 3,000 years ago. His name is King Joe. And he was notorious for all sorts of decadence. And the big legend that loomed large to represent it is that he used ivory chopsticks to eat. Yeah. And so then that was also promoted by the next dynasty as part of the reason they should rule not the previous guys. and to this day, 3,000 years later, the main fact about him is that he used ivory

chopsticks and therefore was a bad guy. It's like how all we remember about Amy Klobuchar is that she might have used a comb to eat a salad. She's the worst. No, she's not the worst. She just represents a lot of failures by people who should represent good things. She's certainly not the best. And she used to comb to eat a salad. Yeah, yeah.

But that's like, but we don't, we don't care about her policy or how she treated staffers. It was like she ate a salad with a gum. Ivory chapsics are a little like that because you can have wood chopsticks, bamboo chopsticks, metal, ceramics, and porcelain. Like, there's all kinds of normal accepted ways to make your chopsticks. Ivory remained weird across all of culture for how people talked about it. And then there were also a couple other chopstick materials that were either fictional or borderline fictional. One of them is gold.

Yeah, I was going to say like gold chopsticks would be decadent, but then you'd have to make an alloy, right? Because otherwise they'd be too soft. Exactly. So apparently as chopstick culture developed, people really only used pure gold chopsticks in fiction. And then it became actually relatively common to decorate a chopstick with gold or to do some kind of alloy. Gildet. That was much less offensive than ivory. It would be your super nice chopsticks if they have any gold on them. But people have nice things for like a special occasion or guests coming over or something.

Was ivory more expensive than gold? It seems like it would be right because elephants only live in certain regions in China. I thought like or you have to. import it from somewhere else. The difference is both costs and the process, yeah. Like, you can mine gold in lots of East Asia and it doesn't kill a pecciderm to get it. Right. And then the last luxury to talk about here is jade.

Mm-hmm. Jade is a wonderful, it's a name for a few beautiful, valuable minerals, usually with a greenish color. Right. It's not just one, is my understanding. And the thing is, apparently there's no examples of people actually. using jade chopsticks because it's way too delicate and expensive. It's just completely you can't do it. Yeah. But it became an icon of some ancient Chinese literature and a trope there. Hmm. Beautiful, especially women in magical situations, either used jade chopsticks or when they wept tears.

Their tears were compared to jade chopsticks because of the shape and color. If it's like a giant endlessly waterfall kind of tears that became a literary trope i see so yeah because i was going to say i it's impossible but you know uh not really seeing the connection between tears and chopsticks but yeah okay i get it now i guess but i mean the color jade's usually more like there are different colors of jade besides green but it's yeah uh is blue is there blue jade i there must be right and either way the green kind's kind of pale, and there's like a... Right, I see. Yeah, yeah.

Tears aren't blue either, though, actually. They're just transparent. So there's a lot of common materials for chopsticks, and then the strange ones had a lot of culture built up around them and can lead to situations where a historical figure is notorious for three millennia for ivory chopsticks. I mean, like, that's a pretty global thing, right? Like growing up with a silver spoon in your mouth, you know, the idea of like silver. Yeah.

I mean, obviously a lot of, like, for people who are wealthy, like you would have silverware would be made out of silver. I think the use of like fine minerals or metals in eating utensils or drinking vessels was also like a sort of like signifier of your snootiness. Yeah, especially because everybody eats, everybody has a version of that stuff. And it's an easy way to pin somebody as rich elite above it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Like I understand every chopsticks better than I understand irrigation and trade policies in ancient China.

Like if that guy was a jerk about that, I don't really know how or why. For me, like irrigation is like second nature to me. I'm just like, yeah, you got to. Throughout every taping, Katie is designing systems to water fields in the background. They're not even using terraces or amateurs. And folks, that's three huge takeaways about chopsticks. We're going to take a quick break, then finish with a giant numbers section about this amazing utensil. All right, let's do it.

We're back, and we're back to finish out the main episode with stats and numbers this week that's in a segment called Because there's stats, they're really, really stats, you know there's stats, there's stats, don't you call them figures, numbers are points just to tell you once again, they're stats. Stats. That name was submitted by The Dan on the Discord. We have a new name for this segment every week. please make them as silly and wacky as possible, submit yours through Discord or to sitpod.g.com. The first number is two, because there are at least two common ways of holding chopsticks in modern Chinese etiquette. I thought you were going to say there's two sticks.

Two chopsticks. I was going to say, Alex, come on. Yeah, the other lore thing, there's just way too many examples, but the biggest symbolism in a lot of cultures for chopsticks is couples and love and marriage. Because it's paired, you know, it's nice. Yeah, they're a pair and then they're keys. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, key source here is Genevieve Yam's piece for serious eats. She also did a survey and some research on it.

And she's Chinese-American. She says that within her immediate family, they do both of these forms of holding chopsticks that are considered typical etiquette. She and her father used what's called the standard grip. And I'm going to keep these brief because we're audio, but her description of the standard grip is you keep one chopstick between your pointer and middle finger, then prop up the other chopstick with your ring finger. The bottom chopstick remains stationary and you move the chopstick on top to grip food. Wait. Okay, I short-circuited.

I've got two pencils here. It's totally audio. It's hard, yeah. So one chopstick, the top chopstick is between your pointer and middle finger. Okay, I got that. And then you just prop up the bottom stationary chopstick with your ring finger. Got it. I think I'm doing it.

Beep, beep, beep, beep. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then Jan says her mom and her sisters do a different thing. So, like, within this immediate family, they do it two different ways. Apparently, many Chinese people call this other way the, quote, lazy method. And she describes it as gripping the chopsticks like a pencil, causing them to criss-cross like scissors. And I'm linking art.

articles and visuals because we're audio. And Yam also says that those aren't the only two ways people do it because people will also fall into some kind of hybrid, either because that's a habit or because of specific foods easier to pick up that way. And so there's both specific etiquette for holding chopsticks and it varies culture to culture a little bit. And people mostly seem to care if you're making an effort and broadly polite as a person. And you're not having one stick in each hand and like stabbing at your food angrily going, why doesn't everybody speak English while you're in like Japan or China? So that's the other thing.

My loose number for this is one because I was looking at lists of culturally specific faux pauses about chopsticks and only one of them jumped out to me as not obvious. Okay. Like the lists are stuff like don't impale food with one. one chopstick. Don't use chopsticks to point at people and things around the room. Don't pantomime with chatt. Like all of them seemed very obvious to me. Don't put two chopsticks in your mouth and say like, look at me. I'm a walrus. Arf, arf, arf, arf. Solid feeling sources I looked at bothered to say that specifically. Like,

don't do a walrus impression. And I was like, I know. Like, you don't need to teach me that. Yeah, apparently Americans, right? Oh, boy. But so I'll link the sources. All of that seemed obvious. But then there was one faux pa that actually jumped out that wasn't necessarily so obvious, in my opinion. Some people in family style eating situations will set their chopsticks down vertically into a large dish of food where there's enough food to like hold them up. Yeah.

I still think that's a little rude, obviously. But it turns out there's also a cultural element where in some cultures, such as well, as China, people will burn sticks of incense at funerals. I've actually heard this before. If you stick the two chopsticks, say you have a bowl of rice and you like stick it into the rice, it looks very similar to a funeral incense situation. Exactly. And so that is, and again, this number is entirely in my opinion, but that was the one

chopstick tip that wasn't obvious to me of don't do this is, like I wouldn't just jam my personal chopsticks into everybody's dish vertically anyway. but there's also an element where it looks like a death-oriented and also, like, respect-oriented thing that you are not achieving, you're not achieving respect by just sticking your chopsticks and stuff. Right, right. My usual go-to thing, and I hope this isn't rude, is like, you know, like if it's disposed, usually, so if they're like the non-disposable chopsticks, they're going to have

the little chopstick holder for you, so it's no problem. But if they're disposable chopsticks, I'll, like, roll it up. like roll up the paper into a little chopstick holder or fold it into a little chopstick holder and put it on there and it's fun for me to do so I hope I hope that's okay a lot of it is your personal vibe

with etiquette in general like if you're a weird jerk about other stuff people might also mind your chopstick use but right or like I get a bunch of them and then I put them between my hand my fingers I'm like I'm Wolverine

Shikah, Shikah. I don't know what, I forgot what Wolverine's catchphrase is. Snick, that's the sound. Snick. Snick. Yeah, so it's not Shikah, Shishak. It's Snick, okay. Snick, snick, it's me. Wolverine. What if we each have different Wolverines, like the different chicken impressions at the rest of development?

A slicey, slicey, slice. A slicey, slicey, slice. Anyway, so, yeah. Like chopstick etiquette, it's casual and also specific at the same time. And then with anything with etiquette, everybody varies. Some people will be very strict and some people won't. Yeah, makes sense to me. The next number is three because there are three different words in Mandarin that add up to a fun wordplay thing involving a wedding gift of chopsticks.

And this part of the numbers will talk about non-English names for chopsticks. There's an English-speaking podcast, so I didn't start there. But, you know, they're called other things, other places. And one common Mandarin name for chopsticks is the word quitsa. Quaitza. I'm also going to play a clip of a speaker saying it. Her name's Sonny. She works for the Taskpins.com language learning site and their YouTube channel.

So she will, at a very slow speed, very slowly saying a better pronunciation of quitesa. Yeah, here we go. Quaitz, quaiz, quaiz. So there you go. That's a better pronunciation. Okay, yeah. That name is fun in any language because it's become part of a wordplay tradition that apparently came around in the Ming Dynasty, mid-1300s to mid-1600s.

Quaitz sounds like another word that can mean happiness and can also mean something being quick or speedy. The word is quai le, like quidse, chopsticks, quai le, happiness or quickly. And then the third word here is the zhe of quidze. That sounds like a very general word that can mean a child and can especially mean a son, a male child. And so that's led to a tradition of giving chopsticks as a wedding gifts with the implication that you're wishing the marriage, happiness and having. sons quickly. I see. Because quites and quaila and zah all interacting in like a three-part pun is the tradition.

But what if you want to have some sad daughters? Then show them Daria? I don't know. There's a lot of ways. You'll figure it out. And yeah, also, like any tradition, if it's from the Ming Dynasty, not everybody still does it or knows about it or cares about it, but it's a thing that's come up. And also, that's the name for chopsticks in Chinese. Now you know. Yeah. And I was curious about why are they called chopsticks by English speakers? And a number there is the late 1500s. That's an estimate of when we think the English language adopted that name for this item that's not from a country like England. And we don't know exactly who coined it, but there's a record from the 1600s of an English.

merchant and writer named Peter Mundy, writing a book for the public where he describes Chinese use of chopsticks and also does not explain what they are. So we think by the 1600s, that was a common concept in England. That chopsticks exist and that's what we call them. And we think that English word is a pigeon usage of some Cantonese plus the English word stick. Right, right. And also a lot of European languages used to. their existing words for sticks to generate a new name for chopsticks. Okay. So what is like the Cantonese word that is similar to chop?

I'll play a clip of someone else saying it. We think that English speakers misuse some existing words that either mean quick or quickly in Cantonese. And I'll play a clip of someone saying that on YouTube, the dim sum saying channel. Here we go. Song-sao. And one more time, they'll say quick, and then they'll say quickly. And I agree that those do not sound like the word chop exactly. Some way some people who spoke English and visited China turned it into that word plus stick.

Okay. Ironically, they're for the opposite of chopping. They're not knives. They're for picking things up. Is it like a similar thing that's happening with like chop suey? because that does not sound like that is at all an actual thing. Yes, yeah, it's people in Europe just trying to piece together a new name they like for something from another culture and applying it. Right, right.

Because, yeah, it's not really similar to the Chinese word for these or any of the other language words for these. One basic Japanese language name for chopsticks is hashi. And also there's a fun thing where the number is August 4th. There's a modern practice of an annual Chopstick Day holiday in Japan. And it's sort of an internet holiday. Not everybody does it. But it involves ritually burning old chopsticks to like honor their past usefulness. And they picked August 4th as a play on words.

Because that Japanese word is haashi for chopsticks. The word for August is hachi. and the word for for is she. So hachi plus she is hashi. And that's why the date sort of sounds like the word chopsticks. Oh, okay. That's fun. It's like...

Another wordplay thing. It's like May the 4th for Star Wars nerds. It's almost exactly like May the 4th. Yes. That's true. So, yeah, so languages have various ways of describing this item. And especially in Europe, they'll tend to... to use their existing word for either sticks or eating sticks.

Oddly in French, they're often called baguettes because the bread is also from the word for sticks or rods. Of course they are. That's so funny. And then one amazing exception is the Portuguese language. Unlike Spanish, German, Russian, French, English, there is a Portuguese word derived from sticks. They might call chapsticks Pausinos, which means little sticks. but other Portuguese speakers, especially in Brazil, call chopsticks the Japanese word, Hashi.

Hmm, okay. And apparently that's because the number is 1549. In 1549, a Jesuit Catholic missionary named Francis Xavier led one of the first Christian missions to Japan. He also co-founded the Jesuits. He became a major saint. So, like, his fame and mission created enough Portuguese interest in Japan that they adopted the actual Japanese. name. Yeah, those Jesuits, always doing things causing cultural crossovers. Yeah, yeah. And then the other particularly European number is 1877. 1877's when a Scottish teenager composed a song

that she called the Celebrated Chop Waltz. And that has become named Chopsticks. It's a piano piece where you just use two fingers to play kind of a repetitive melody. Right. And I had always assumed that I was named that because, like, your two fingers are, like, chopsticks and just you could play it with chopsticks. Exactly. And, yeah, it's just a choice that some especially European and white people have made. But initially, the song, you were supposed to do sort of chopping motions with your whole hand. And really the only reason anybody ever heard this song, this teenager, her name was Euphemia Allen. That's a euphemia is, man, we got to bring back that name. That's a good one. Yeah, and she came from a musical and whimsical family.

Like, her father was a dance instructor. Her parents got all their kids really into music to the point that Euphemia's older brother was given the name Mozart. His name was Mozart Allen. But he's not Mozart. Like, he is a Mozart. He is not the Mozart. Right. And the famous one, Mozart is his last name.

It's silly. It's silly. Yeah. But Mozart Allen launched a very successful sheet music publishing business. And so he is the only reason anybody in the UK heard about his teenage little sister's song idea. Right. And then it took off partly because people found it like a whimsical version of Asian stereotypes, basically. Just a couple more numbers for the main episode.

The next one is 2022. 2022 is when Japanese researchers unveiled a prototype set of electric chopsticks that will enhance the salty taste in food. Okay, this is, I saw a picture of this, and I thought this was like, remember we did the episode on Bluetooth, and then I found out that everything is Bluetooth, like, everything, toilet paper holders, uh, tongs, pans, everything is Bluetooth. I thought this was just another Bluetooth thing, but you're telling me that this will make me taste salt. The Bluetooth episode we did made me search smart chopsticks. And I wondered about, like, is anyone doing smart chopsticks? And there's a few ways people have tried to innovate chopsticks recently that have not taken off and maybe points to the excellence of the design of ordinary chopsticks from many thousands of years ago. But this was the most exciting idea.

These were engineers at Meiji University and also some corporate support from Kirin Holdings, like the Kirin Ichabon Beer people. They built chopsticks that enhance the saltiness of the food you're eating by using electrical stimulation and then a mini computer worn on a wristband. Then it sends a weak electrical current to transmit the sodium ions from food up to your mouth to create an additional boost of the saltiness. feeling and flavor. Whoa.

Is this meant to help people cut back on salt? Yes, which is a great purpose. It's good. Yeah. If you got chronic kidney disease, you can't have salt or high blood pressure or there's all sorts of things where you've got to cut back on salt. So it'd be nice to have electrocute your tongue and trick it into thinking you're getting more salt.

Yeah. Yeah. And there's another way where the world of people using chopsticks is not a monolith. And in Japanese cuisine, there's a particularly strong element of salt and sodium. And apparently, the average Japanese adult consumes about 10 grams of salt per day, which is double the World Health Organization recommendation. So this project was intended to make people feel more of a salty feeling with less salt in the food. And who knows if it'll grow, take off.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I feel like if they could get it without the wristband, then it. it would because right now it's sort of a weird it's very noticeable yeah and it's not quite Bluetooth because it's all wired and then through your body yeah so it was interesting to find this I mean it's you know it is a big gizmo on your arm yeah it is it is it is it would start a conversation I think you couldn't whip this out at a restaurant and expect to not be noticed really like part of the beauty of chopsticks is their ordinary like part of the beauty of chopsticks as their ordinariness, that you can just start using them.

So if you have gear, people will ask about it. Yeah. Yeah. Like if you have a robo fork, they will also ask about it. Hang on, let me strap on my chopsticks harness real quick. Yeah. And the other attempt that smart chopsticks began as an April Fool's Day joke, the number is 2014.

The large Chinese search engine company, Baidu, made an April Fool's joke about smart chop sticks, where it detects the freshness of food. It checks if the food is made with recycled cooking oil. It's all made up. Right, right. And then this April Fool's joke received massive consumer demands. Oh, boy. And Baidu tried to build it and apparently just failed to be able to accomplish the technology.

I mean. But people really wanted it. Yeah. I don't know how you like. I don't know how a chopstick would detect expired cooking oil. That seems a little difficult. Essentially, they just can't do it. But it is a major food safety concern in modern China

that some businesses are using totally recycled cooking oil in a way that's dangerous to people. Right. Like they reprocess waste or there's like actual poisonous stuff in it. And so people really wanted that gadget from the joke. and then Baidu tried to build it. And the stories from 11 years ago, so it seems like they just failed. Wow.

That's just not doable. That sucks. And then the final truly bizarre number is 2016, because in 2016, the fast casual restaurant chain in the U.S. Panda Express introduced the Chork. Oh, what a good name. The Chork, which is a combination of chopstick fork. Okay. And we'll have diagrams linked, and I guess sporks could be a hold episode. Apparently, they date back more than 100 years, the spork and other combinations of Western utensils.

But the chork, apparently the chork was developed in the early 2010s by a company called Brown Innovation Group in Princeton, Kentucky. The idea is that it's both a forkhead and two chopsticks that are initially all one item. so you can either use it as a fork or you can snap one end apart to have sort of training chopsticks where they're still bound together or you can snap it all the way apart and have two separate chopsticks with just a vestigial half of a fork on the back of each end. Right. So like the fork, I'm looking at it, the fork handle is like the chopsticks. And then when you usually, with the most like disposable chopsticks, you kind of have a little wooden bar at the top where they're connected.

Yeah. That part is like fork prongs, and it looks like they're made out of plastic. Yes, and they're also plastic. And this was apparently so unpopular that Panda Express introduced it as a promotional item in 2016, and then never talked about it again. I have no other stories to link, and I also have a Reddit thread to link where Panda Express employees talk about, hey, have any of you seen any more boxes of chorks from headquarters? And they say, no, it's been more than a year.

They never told us anything. It just like was, I think, repulsive to people, the idea of turning chopsticks also into a fork. And so it just went away. We will leave the chork where it belongs in the dustbin of history. It's abomination. Two things that should have never been amalgamed into one. Yeah, there's all kinds of practices. and cultural reasons to really celebrate the chopsticks.

So attempts to innovate them are either very, very cutting edge and we'll see or are totally unpopular in a truly profound way. The only thing that makes sense for this is like the part where it's like the training, like, because as a kid, I found the training chopsticks to be very useful. But that was just where they rolled the little paper and put a little, rubber band on it, and then I could use it with the little fulcrum, and that was really useful as a kid learning how to do it. But it doesn't, it doesn't, yeah, I don't.

Folks can't see Katie is trying to process these images of the chalk I sent her. Yeah. Okay, I have a new idea. It's called a snife. It's like a spoon, but it's sharp and serrated like a knife. so you can eat ice cream with it and cut your meat at the same time. Just very carefully. You're about to get a massive lawsuit from Big Grapefruit.

They're going to be so bad. You know, at a certain point, it's just like, you got to stop. You got to stop, man. And Panda Express is primarily in the United States. States. That's what America said. They were like cut it out with the chork. Yeah. No chork. Have they tried to do a, um, a chippoon? Like a, or a, it's a spoon and a Chipotle burrito. Yeah. Yeah. Is it an entire burrito for scooping like a boat? Yeah, or a or a, or a, or a spock chip. I don't know how to do. It's, uh, have they, have they,

Yeah, like a spoon chopstick. Basically, no, because chopsticks were always a sidekick of spoons until later. Right. Yeah, I mean. But that's probably the last frontier because that was never, ever anybody's need. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

The chippoon. The only, my brain can't process. The spopstick, you know, yeah. The spop. Word play is fun. I think once we start getting to the spop-spip, whatever you said, society has reached a plateau. Yeah, let's all just singularity at that point. We don't need physical forms anymore.

Folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, chopsticks originated in China as a secondary utensil and spoon sidekick for eating stew. Takeaway number two, disposable chopsticks might have been invented more than 1,000 years ago by construction workers building Japanese palaces. and receiving new Chinese influence.

Takeaway number three is all about luxurious chopstick materials and about how the final Shang Dynasty ruler has been demonized for 3,000 years for using ivory chopsticks. And then so many numbers and stats after those takeaways and also inside of them about everything from the names in other languages for chopsticks, the etiquette for chopsticks, that piece of music called chopsticks, and strange modern attempts to revolutionize the chopstick. Those are the takeaways.

Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode.

This week's bonus topic is baseball bat chopsticks. It's chopsticks made of baseball bats and how that might help reforest northern Japan. Visit sifpod.fod.fund for that bonus show for a library of more than 22 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of maximum fun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things. Check out our research source. on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources this week include a really astonishing book and work of history. It's called Chopsticks, a cultural and culinary history. It's by

historian Kew Edward Wong, who is professor of history and coordinator of Asian studies at Rowan University in New Jersey. There's also a lot of tremendous and well-researched food writing on the internet. Examples include a piece for the New York Times by Amy Chin, Food Writing for Serious Eats.com by Genevieve Yom. And a lot of radio journalism, too. An NPR piece by Anthony Coon and a piece for KUERU-U-R Utah Public Radio by University of Utah Emeritus Professor Nalini Nodkarni. That page also features resources such as native-land.claan.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie-Lanabe people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategoke people, and others.

Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people in life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 84.

That's about the topic of vending machines. Fun fact there, the origin of the U.S. chewing gum industry was a guy who was the former personal secretary of Mexican general Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast creature feature about animals, science, and more.

Our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budo's band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that?

Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artists-owned shows supported directly by you.