May is Asian heritage month in the U.S. and Canada, but most of us probably celebrate the Asian diaspora year-round by enjoying one of the greatest gifts from the other edge of the Pacific Rim: Asian food. But sometimes, in our uncommon hurry to enjoy the ramen or the curry, we may find ourselves slurping up all kinds of bad takes along with our good takeout. Ken Jennings, of Jeopardy! fame is obviously not Asian, but (fun fact!) he grew up in Asia, which sort of qualifies him to set us straight on some of the biggest culinary misconceptions about the world's biggest continent. Check, please!
The Debunker: What Utensils Should I Use for Thai Food?
Asking for a fork at an Asian restaurant might be one of life's most demoralizing small defeats—or small embarrassments, if it's your visiting parent who's harassing the waiter. Eating competently with chopsticks, the paired sticks first used as utensils in China over six thousand years ago, is a neat shorthand for worldliness and open-mindedness and, in general, having your culinary s*** together.
But if you're a fan of Thai food, as I am, you might have noticed that Thai restaurants in the West generally start diners out with a fork and spoon. Many's the time I've seen an American customer patiently correct the server and ask for chopsticks, which always quickly appear. "It's okay, I'm not one of those people," these diners are saying. "I can handle the real thing. You saw that I ordered the curry with five spiciness stars—pretty cool for a white guy, right?"
But these chopstick-insisters have it backwards. In Thailand, everyone's been eating with forks and spoons for over a century. Only farang, or foreigners, ask for chopsticks. (The exception is noodle soups borrowed from China. Those are served with chopsticks.) Do you remember the Jerry Seinfeld routine about how he admires China for "staying with the sticks"? "You know they've seen the fork!" That's more or less how Thailand adopted European utensils. In the most commonly told version of the story, the Westernizing Thai king Rama IV (of The King and I fame!) introduced forks and spoons to Thai cuisine after his brother, Vice-king Pinklao, attended a demonstration of dining etiquette by the American missionary D. B. Bradley. It's not clear whether Rama's pro-fork policy was a case of "Hey, this is way better!" or "If we adopt enough white people stuff, maybe they won't colonize us." But either way, his legacy lives on at Thai tables today.
Quick Quiz: In what toy store do Tom Hanks and Robert Loggia play "Heart and Soul" and "Chopsticks" during the famous giant-piano scene in Big?
Ken Jennings is the author of eleven books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.