American Eating Habits

(or) Did you know Americans eat their food with one hand?

31.05.2024

By Paul Haneke

In Germany, the most common way of managing what’s on your plate is by making use of two pieces of silverware. Usually, one is equipped with a fork for shoveling and picking up, as well as a knife for scooping and cutting (for the sake of argument, let us leave soup out of the picture).

In the United States, however, the act of eating usually unfolds one-handed. Hand them a fork, and they will eat anything with ease, leaving no crumbs (soups excluded, of course; I am going to boldly presume we all eat those roughly the same way). No tilting of the plate to get that last piece of broccoli onto your fork; no supplementary knife to guide it toward the right path. Just one hand, one fork, and surgical precision are all it takes for Americans to empty their plates.

This observation of habit is mostly based on personal experience since I had the privilege of living with an American family for roughly eleven months. And I think it is worth mentioning that they themselves could not get over the fact that me and my Danish host-brother could not eat properly, or rather as effectively, without using a knife, regularly mocking our dependence on it.

Even when eating something that requires the use of a knife, like, for example, a steak, the knife is only used when absolutely necessary. Instead of cutting each piece only moments before consumption, like most of us Europeans would, they tend to cut the entire steak into small pieces before starting to eat. Then the knife is entirely put away, and dinner is once again handled one-handed. And to top it all off, while eating, the fork even switches hands from time to time.

But then again, since most of these observations are purely based on personal experience, they do, of course, not represent the eating habits of every US citizen, just as my personal eating habits and those of my peers do not represent those of every other German or European.

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Fachbereich Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften