What did people use before forks?

Answer 1

Early eaters in the BF (before forks) period of human history (Before the 11th century in Europe) had a choice of:

* Fingers: (Good for chunks and meat on bones but poor for small greasy bits or hot food (a dead loss for soups)

* Spoons: Good for soups and stews but not so good for large chunks like turnips or large pieces of meat on bones

* Knives: Good for cutting chunks of meat off of large cooked animals, reducing the size of turnips , or stabbing reasonable sized chunks of hot food to eat. One problem was still having to hold the hot meat (or turnip) to cut and the potential for cutting fingers while cutting the big chunks (especially when greasy). Also a potential cutting of the mouth during eating.

With these disadvantages in mind, people settled on the knife as the tool with room for improvement:

1. They tried using two knives. one to pin the food down while cutting with the other, but the food would often spin aroud the holding knife's blade while cutting.

2. The stage two improvement was to make the holding knife have two prongs instead of one blade. This corrected the spinning problem but was difficult to carry food to the mouth unless the food were speared on the tines,

3. As a third attempt they added another tine or two and curved them slightly. This allowed the food to be held to be cut, held the food to carry to mouth when speared, and allowed the food to be picked up like a spoon while letting excess sauce or gravy drip off.

This apparent success was no enough for some folks who notched rudimentary tines into the tips of the spoon to create the "spork" (spoon + fork) and others to even sharpen or serrate one side of the spork to allow it to be used as a knife.