Student sheet 1: The Origins of chopsticks

People in Asia use many different forms of eating utensils, for example, hands, spoons, forks, knives and chopsticks.

Chopsticks come in different sizes. Most Chinese chopsticks are slim, tapered sticks about 25 cm long and about as thick as a pencil. Chopsticks used for cooking can be up to 50 cm long! In Japan chopsticks are shorter and taper to a point at one end.

Chopsticks are made from a variety of materials: wood, bamboo, plastic, jade, ivory, gold and silver. Sometimes wealthy families in the olden days used ivory chopsticks tipped with silver. It was believed that silver was protection against poison because if the silver-tipped chopsticks touched poisoned food they would turn black.

People started eating with chopsticks many thousands of years ago. Some say that it was a greedy person who thought of the idea first.

Imagine a large metal pot on three legs over the cooking fire. These pots were so big that they took at least an hour to cool down after the food was cooked. Perhaps someone was so hungry they couldn’t wait. Can you guess what happened?

He or she grabbed a pair of sticks, poked them into the delicious steaming food and lifted out the tastiest pieces. Others who watched might have thought, ‘What a clever idea’, and copied. Others might have tried it and gradually everyone began using chopsticks.

Some people say chopsticks became popular in China because a famous teachers and philosopher named Confucius taught that honourable people would rather see an animal alive than dead. To use knives reminded him of killing animals so he asked the villages not to use them to eat with. The villagers had to find another way of eating their food.

Others think chopsticks are widely used because, for many, food and fuel for cooking has always been scarce. To help solve this problem, food was cut up and cooked quickly to save time and conserve fuel. Because the food is in small pieces it is easy to delicately pluck at the morsels with the chopsticks.

Extracted from Access Asia: Primary Teaching and Learning Units, Curriculum Corporation, 1996, p 80.