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Comment by snarkyturtle | Hacker News Reader

Rice is the hardest thing to eat with a fork. Especially the non-sticky kind. Foods like rice and other loose foods should be exempt from etiquettes in favor of the most efficient method. Otherwise, as noted in the article, it'll lead to either an excruciatingly slow and/or messy meal, which is all the more noticeable than the way you hold your fork.

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That's why, in many countries in Southeast Asia (Thailand, Malaysia, Burma, the Philippines), you eat your meal with a spoon and a fork; the spoon goes in the right hand and the fork goes in the left. You push food onto the spoon and shove it into your mouth. Try it sometime. It's the most efficient way to eat rice. I find it even more efficient than the East Asian way of picking up the bowl and using the chopsticks to move the rice into your mouth.

If you've ever eaten at a nice sit-down Thai restaurant, that's why they'll give you a spoon and a fork. I've had this confirmed by friends whose families were from Malaysia and Burma. If you're looking for the most efficient way to eat rice, this is it.

It depends on the stickiness of the rice. If you make rice to normal (for Chinese... ok, Taiwanese I can't actually speak for the mainland) levels of stickiness, then shoveling in with chopsticks is every bit as efficient as using a spoon, especially if you use the small rice bowls (it's hard to cram a spoon in there while it's up at your face).

The looser the rice becomes, the more efficient spoons become. When I get fried rice (typically fairly unsticky) with my western friends, I always laugh a bit as they attempt to eat it with chopsticks. Pretty much every pragmatic Chinese immigrant (of my generation anyways) just ends up falling back to spoons then.

...and the incredibly systems engineer in me points out that since most chinese main dishes are meant to be eaten with chopsticks (the whole grab a bit, eat it above your rice and let the sauce enrich the loveliness), and the fact that it's nice to keep a hand free for liquid, using a spoon to eat rice in an entire Chinese meal would decrease the overall efficiency.

Strong disagree. With a bit of practise one can learn to balance a decent amount of rice on the back of one's fork. Green peas, alas, escape even the most practised forking, regardless of which method - balancing on the back or stab-them-to-death - one chooses.

That's the thing though. Why even practice balancing when you don't need to balance it using the contour of the fork to your benefit? It's like having a car only to put it in neutral and push it the rest of the way. Sure, you can do it on level ground and it's plain easy to ride it downhill. But if you're pushing it uphill you shouldn't think "hey, I'll just keep pushing this until I become strong enough to do this without effort", you should think "let's just use an essential function of the damn car".

it could be worse, you could be using chopsticks to fit in...

Sticky rice is sticky for a reason.

>Green peas, alas, escape even the most practised forking, regardless of which method - balancing on the back or stab-them-to-death - one chooses.

Personally I choose not to eat peas at all unless furnished with a spoon :P.

(And what other colours of peas do you get where you come from?)

Don't forget black-eyed peas et al.

Well, you live and learn - looking those up I think I've always called them 'those beans, you know, the black and white ones we used to have to rehydrate and which would sit in the cupboard for years before anyone bothered to eat them'.

There are also yellow split peas which I really should have thought of.

This is why green peas should always be accompanied by a good thick gravy, to act as a binding agent.

I'm reminded of the poem:

I eat my peas with honey, I've done it all my life. It makes my peas taste funny, but it keeps them on my knife.

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