Essay On Chopsticks

Chopsticks are a set of well-known eating utensils which are widely used in parts of Asia. They are nothing more than just two identical thin sticks with pointed or blunt ends which are made of wood, bamboo, plastic, silver, etc.. It is very simple to operate chopsticks, I would say, just hold them and use them. Apart from liquid food such as soup and porridge, I eat with chopsticks for nearly all meals. I found this practice relatively dominant particularly in Chinese community where it is not always convenient to obtain an alternative to chopsticks. Using chopsticks, this bodily practice has been typically associated to Asian culture (not merely Chinese culture since Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc. are also commonly reviewed as typical

Correspondingly Mauss (1973) advocates that technique “has to be effective and traditional” (p. 75). Chopsticks, undoubtedly, contains both of these characteristics: they are cultural inheritance from the ancient Chinese history and have contributed to the evolution of eating utensils. Instead of asking how we learn to use chopsticks, in which the possible answers would be education or imitation of the action, perhaps it is more significant to concern about why we learn to use chopsticks. Mauss (1973) imposes a supportive notion – the “prestigious imitation” (p. 73) which gives an answer to why we learn a practice. We are not simply imitating an action; we imitate it from a successful and authoritative individual (p. 73) whom we are socially convinced and who can make us psychologically believe that the action, which might become our practice afterwards, is necessary or significant to be possessed. The authority that encourage or coerce me to use chopsticks could be the community I lived in or my family itself. This is possibly engaged with the ideology of comformity and adherence to the dominance, and unconsciously rejection of being solitary in a gregarious community. Thus, I learned to imitate the use of chopsticks as an eating utensil, adapt to the social and cultural coding embedded and transform this practice to be my ‘second

I hate eating noodles with fork as I show relatively clumsiness when I use fork to eat soup noodles in particular. In my perspective, chopsticks are undoubtedly the best and the only option in this situation. However to be frank, it is quite another thing when it comes to other food culture, e.g. pasta, which is a typical representative of Western cuisine. To make a comparison, I choose Chinese lā miàn and Italian spaghetti which are rather similar in terms of material, appearance and texture. Both are mainly made of flour, shaped long and thin, and often tangled up after cooked. However I insist to use chopsticks for lā miàn, but not for spaghetti. Eating spaghetti with chopsticks is, I would say, an awkward perception. Objects functioned under this habitus system is not merely the utensil and body technique used, but also the food consumed. A strong bond of social and cultural context integrates the body of food and forms food culture. Food culture determines the relation between bodies and consumption, and the connection between practice and cultural context; whilst practice may carry certain norms such as what ingredients is mainly used, which utensils to be utilized, what taste it tends to be, etc.. Food culture works as a