Anthropologist: "The proper way of eating is with a spoon and a fork"

(Links updated 7.9.2020) A Montreal newspaper story has rapidly sent Filipino tempers rising around the world. Luc Cagadoc, a 7-year-old pupil, was punished by a lunchtime day-care monitor: “You are in Canada. Here in Canada you should eat the way Canadians eat,” the Quebecois educator allegedly said, and went on to observe that Luc “ate like a pig.” The reason: Luc insisted on eating with a spoon and fork as most Filipinos do.

"Educators and parents alike should find ways to work together to avoid traumatizing children who deserve more than to be made to feel inferior because of their parent’s culture", the editor (I suppose) of the Philippine Daily Inquirer comments (text no longer online).

In a follow-up article called "Spoon Wars" (no longer online), anthropologist Michael L. Tan gives us more information about food, eating habits and cultural history (that's the role anthropologists should play, isn't it?):

For Filipinos, and most Asians, spoons were the greatest invention ever. Throw away the knife and the fork but never the spoon, which we use for soups, desserts, vegetables, even to cut meat.

Anyone with knowledge of culinary history can tell you the spoon was the first eating utensil to have been invented. Knives, well, they were originally invented as weapons, and then got reduced for the dining table. And the fork, the infamous fork that westerners insist is the main eating utensil? They come much later, introduced from the Middle East into southern Europe, but treated with disdain by the northern Europeans.

(...)

Etiquette changes all the time because they’re based on meanings we give to people, events, places. In earlier less civil times, meals could become quite violent so the last thing you needed were utensils brandished like weapons, which is why the Chinese resisted knives and forks and stuck to chopsticks.

(...)

But don’t worry, with 8 million Filipinos living and working in Canada and all kinds of other remote, savage lands, many infiltrating homes as nannies and cooks and housekeepers, we’ll teach the world that the proper way of eating is with a spoon and a fork.

Michael L. Tan is an engaged anthropologist. He publishes most of his columns in a blog called Pinoy Kasi. His older texts can be found at http://www.pinoykasi.homestead.com. His current texts are available here: https://opinion.inquirer.net/byline/michael-l-tan