I say, you ever wonder why the Chinese use
chopsticks? Well, it’s got something to do with Confucius
and ... Cardinal Richelieu? I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense
right now, but it’s actually true, sort of … and the two men did have one thing
in common: they both hated eating with knives. Now, you might wonder, what’s wrong with
knives? After all, we’ve been using them since neolithic
times. They're the simplest way to stuff your face
... until they aren’t, and that’s where chopsticks come in. The first chopsticks (that we know of at least)
are around three thousand years old, and were found in the ruins of the city of Yin, the
last capital of the Shang Dynasty in Northern China. Now, interestingly enough, these chopsticks
were only used to stir stews; they weren’t actually used for eating. The Shang Dynasty also used long forks in
their kitchens, yet for meal times, it was the good old knife and fingers. So when did chopsticks make their way to the
dining table? Well, to find the answer to that we need to
fast forward a millennium or so, to around two thousand years ago during the Han Dynasty. Like their Shang predecessors, the Han ate
almost exclusively millet: it didn’t need fertilizer or particularly good soil, which
was great because the north had neither. The Han made porridge out of their millet
and as you can imagine, eating porridge with chopsticks is not exactly the easiest thing
to do, so it never caught on. But as the Han Dynasty expanded south, their
diet started changing. You see, the south was perfectly suited for
growing rice; in fact, rice grew so plentifully there that they had enough leftover to feed
the north with it too. Now, you might think that it’s equally difficult
to eat rice with chopsticks, but East Asian rice is starchy and conveniently sticks together
in nice clumps: very easy to grab with a couple of sticks. Of course, it wasn’t just rice that did
it: in the north, millet had another challenger - wheat. More wheat meant less porridge and more noodles
and dumplings, which of course leads to chopsticks again. This period also saw the rise of stir frying
– for which food was pre-cut into bite-sized morsels, all the easier to pick up and eat
with your trusty chopsticks. They’re pretty damn versatile, these chopsticks,
and what was even better: they’re cheap. This actually matters quite a lot when you’ve
got a population as big as China’s, which - mind you - was about 1/4th of the entire
world’s population at the time. More people means less resources to go round:
less metal for knives and forks, less fuel for fires. And here’s some culinary physics for you:
cutting food into small chunks before cooking it makes it cook faster and uses less fuel. It’s economics all the way down ... and
a bit of psychology as well. After all, once you start using chopsticks,
you’d naturally prefer smaller chunks of food that are easier to eat with said chopsticks. So in the end, knives moved from the table
to the kitchen and chopsticks from the kitchen to the table. Our good friend Confucius was one of the biggest
advocates of chopsticks: in his eyes, a tool as violent and barbaric as the knife had no
place on an honorable man’s table. In fact, he made such a big deal out of it
that his followers recorded this in the Book of Rites, one of the Five Classics that make
up the core of Confucian philosophy. Now, I know that ever since we started this,
you’ve been meaning to ask what the hell does Cardinal Richelieu have to do with any
of this. Well, although he probably wasn’t well-versed
in his Confucian etiquette, he too hated seeing knives at his table. You see, back in those days, the knives you’d
find on the average European dining table were pretty sharp; in fact, they were just
as sharp as a knife you’d use to stab someone. What’s even weirder though, is that when
your table guests weren’t actively conspiring against you, they’d use those same sharp
knives as toothpicks. Richelieu, being the cunning mastermind that
he was, started ordering every knife’s blade to be ground down until it could barely cut
anything. Richelieu fixed his pointy-knife problem by
inventing the table knife, while Confucius solved it by popularizing chopsticks. And that my friends is the point ... or not,
as the case may be. Well, my friends, I hope I’ve satiated your
culinarily-historical hunger. In case I did, you’ll be happy to hear that
we’re cooking new batches as we speak, so if you’d like to be the first to know when
the next one is ready, feel free to subscribe and hit that bell button with your chopsticks
or bluntened knife. Again, thank you for watching; we’ll see
each other again soon for the next deliciously delectable and devious episode of SideQuest!
