Here's The Right Way To Use Chopsticks

Some Westerners are reluctant to use chopsticks due to a perceived difficulty. This is silly. They aren't difficult, but you do need to get used to them. While you can hold your chopsticks however you like, there is a proper way of holding them which thousands of years of use suggests is the easiest and most elegant. (You'll want to follow along in the picture above.) You hold one chopstick in your dominant hand between your pointer, middle finger, and thumb, and when you move it up and down, your thumb should be stationary. You can practice with a single chopstick to get this right. The other chopstick goes between your thumb and your palm, rests on your ring finger, and stays still.

And that's it! It might look difficult, but it's just one of those things: like riding a bike, rolling your R's, or opening a beer bottle with another beer bottle: you get better with practice. To be fair, while this is considered the proper way to hold chopsticks, a large number of people who eat with chopsticks regularly just do it however it feels right to them. According to a Meijiro University study in 2012, only 30 percent of Japanese people aged from their 40s to their 50s actually held their chopsticks in the proper way. In Singapore, it is apparently common for people to rest the ends of the chopsticks between the thumb and forefinger and manipulate the top chopstick with the middle and forefinger alone. This is considered a more awkward position, but it clearly works for them.

So if you already have a satisfactory way of using chopsticks, you can get away with it even though witnesses might occasionally shake their heads at you. But if you're a complete chopstick novice, you're probably better off learning the standard position. You need to know the rules before you can break them!

In Japanese etiquette it's considered improper to lay your chopsticks across your bowl at the end of the meal. You might be forgiven for wondering what on Earth you should do with them. Fear not! Japanese restaurants that expect you to eat this elegantly will provide a hashioki, a chopstick rest. Originally developed in the Heian period as an earthernware holder to keep chopsticks warm during state banquets, they've since been refined to keep chopsticks clean and show off one's refinement to guests.

Even some disposable chopstick makers have planned for this. In 2016, Twitter user Trash Panda realized the chunk of wood at the end of some disposable chopsticks could be snapped off to serve as a makeshift hashioki, which caused a surprisingly large segment of social media to collectively exclaim, "Oh, what? Of course! I'm an idiot for not realizing." If your disposable chopsticks don't have the bit at the end, you can always roll up the paper sleeve the chopsticks come in to fashion a makeshift chopstick rest. According to Rocket News, this is also an opportunity to practice your origami skills, though I suspect some purists would consider this as following the letter of the etiquette rules but not the spirit.

The Japanese language has a lot of chiding words for chopstick no-nos: "namidahashi" ("tearing chopsticks") for when they're covered in food scraps or used to pick food up from the table, "saguribashi" ("probing chopsticks") when using them to dig for food rather than decisively selecting a piece, "mayoibashi" ("lost chopsticks") for indecisively pointing one's chopsticks at different dishes, "utsuribashi" ("transporting chopsticks") for transporting food from one pair of chopsticks to another, and "neburibashi" ("licking chopsticks") for when someone sticks their chopsticks in their mouth for too long and makes noises. Similar expressions exist in other Asian languages, and you can tell people did these things all the time by the fact they had to invent words for them.

Japanese chopstick use differs from standard Chinese practice in some ways: while placing your chopsticks across your bowl after eating is fine in China and Taiwan, in Japan it's a faux pas. Perhaps the etiquette point the Japanese are particular sticklers about is their disdain for "jikabashi" ("direct chopsticks") using one's own chopsticks to take food from the collective plates. To do so is seen as unhygienic, and uncomfortably reminiscent of the way bones are handled during funeral rites. While traditionally it was proper to use a different pair of chopsticks to move the food from communal plate to eating plate, many modern Japanese adopt a compromise of reversing the chopsticks in their hands when taking communal food instead. This isn't really considered good manners either, but it's better than nothing.

I've often wondered why no culture in the world uses the tongs as an eating utensil. You can pick things up and stuff them in your mouth, which seems to be the main criteria. But tongs are unwieldy and you're better off using chopsticks. The same rule actually applies to cooking as well. In Japan, cooking chopsticks are known as saibashi, twice as long as eating chopsticks and usually tied at the end so you can hang them up after you've finished using them.

Food writer Dakota Kim learned the value of chopsticks as a kitchen tool by watching her mother use them to deftly pluck fried chicken from oil. A slotted spoon was a relative hassle by comparison. Chopsticks are great for cooking stir-fry and pasta, blanching vegetables, flipping bacon, straining noodles, mixing sauces, tossing salads, plucking olives or pickles out of long jars, testing to see if baked potatoes or muffins are cooked, pitting cherries, skewering vegetables, toasting marshmallows, stirring coffee grounds, and even substituting for extra-long matches if you have a hard-to-reach pilot light on the stove. Chopsticks are a lighter touch affording more control, superior to savage tongs when flipping delicate things like tofu or flaky fish. David Barry from the renowned Culinary Institute of America advises using chopsticks to scramble eggs, as they're less likely to scratch up your pan while being adept at breaking eggs up into small curds. Julia Child was another believer in cooking chopsticks, using them on The French Chef to make omelettes.

They can even take the place of tweezers when delicately laying herbs, micro-greens, gold leaf, chocolate shavings, crystallized fruit, edible flowers, or precise drabs of sauce onto a plate. You'll be wondering why you bothered with the tweezers in the first place.

Chopsticks are a versatile tool which can substitute for tongs, spatulas, or spoons. Sure, you won't want to throw those out — don't try flipping a steak or pancakes with chopsticks — but if you have cooking chopsticks to hand you'll find yourself reaching for them more than any other utensil. And even if you don't have the fancy cooking chopsticks, a normal pair of eating chopsticks will substitute in a pinch, a perfect compromise for a penniless university student.

From the 10th century, fortune tellers in China believed chopsticks were efficacious fortune telling tools. Some even prayed to the kuaizi shen, or chopsticks god. There is no record of this tradition in Japan, but in Shinto it is important to provide chopsticks for the omnipresent kami spirits that might wish to attend dinner.

Some still believe you can divine someone's future or personality with chopsticks. Holding one's chopsticks low indicates a conservative personality, while holding them high shows an active nature and an adventurous approach to eating — though if you're a young woman, it also indicates how far away you'll settle down when you get married.

In 2014, dim sum and cocktail restaurant chain Ping Pong took advantage of this history in 2014 when it developed its own fortune telling chopsticks with a thermosensitive lacquer which would change color — to green, white, red, blue, or yellow — when used, which are associated with the elements of Chinese philosophy, namely wood, metal, fire, water, and earth. No luck getting your hands on them now, though. The offer was limited to the first 300 customers to say "kung hei fat choy" ("Happy New Year") to the Ping Pong staff.