A History of Western Eating Utensils, From the Scandalous Fork to the Incredible Spork | Arts & Culture| Smithsonian Magazine

Last weekend I went on my first backpacking trip and was introduced to what might be called the super-spork. Superior to the spoon/fork combination found in school cafeterias, which is usually a poor substitute for either implement (just try eating spaghetti with a spork), this Swiss Army Knife of tableware had a spoon at one end and a fork at the other, and one of the outer tines of the fork was serrated to be used as a knife. The latest evolution in eating implements got me wondering about the history of the utensils we usually take for granted. I found part of my curiosity satisfied in  an article about the origins of the fork, by Chad Ward, at Leite's Culinaria. It turns out the fork is a relatively new invention. Although the first forks were used in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, the two-tined instruments were used only as cooking tools at the time. It wasn't until the Middle Ages that a smaller version was used for eating by wealthy families of the Middle East and Byzantine Emp

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• Cayenne Chen