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Comment by idbehold | Hacker News Reader

I hate forks as much as the next person (compared to spoons and knives, forks are far worse at performing their primary job), but I'm not sure about these pincers. For one thing they look more difficult to clean (stuff would get stuck at the base).

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But forks can scoop, poke, and cut. I'd rather the versatility than multiple task-specific utensils.

Sure, but if you also had a spoon and knife then the fork is really just trying to compete with the knife at cutting and the spoon at scooping. It loses both of those competitions and is relegated to being a poker. The fork is a jack of all trades and a master of none.

Didn't you just define a superior use case for each of the three utensils? Why does the fork lose? I can't really think of any meal where a knife on its own is useful. If I could only pick one to eat all my meals with, I think the fork would be most useful.

Interesting. If I had to pick one utensil to eat with in a domestic setting (of the typical Western three) it would be a fork.

In a more general or survival setting I’d choose a knife.

In a domestic setting, I'd argue a spoon is quite a bit more versatile especially in the context of scooping liquids. Anything you can poke and lift with a fork you can probably scoop and lift with a spoon instead.

A fork is arguably most useful in conjunction with a knife because it's generally easier to hold foods for cutting with a fork than with a spoon.

You can still drink liquids without any utensil from whatever vessel they’re in, in most cases.

Pour one out for our humble cafeteria friend the spork.

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