They are so ubiquitous that most people don't even realize they have an origin.

They're so commonly used that many of you might have them in your hands right now.

Yet the objects that we use to eat with have very definite histories.

Moreover, around the world we use very different objects to consume our food and sometimes we use the

exact same objects in very different ways. Learn more about eating utensils,

how they were developed and how they're used in different cultures, on this episode

of Everything Everywhere Daily. There is a statistic that is floated around for years, and I don't know how accurate it is, but it seems reasonable,

that about one third of the world eats using their hands, one third of the world uses chopsticks,

and the other third uses cutlery. As we'll see these

divisions between how people eat are not necessarily cut and dry and it isn't

either one or the other. So let's start with a brief overview of eating with your

hands.

This obviously is the way all humans originally ate.

Today you can find billions of people who eat this way with the two largest centers of it probably

being in South Asia and East Africa.

If you've ever been to an Indian restaurant you probably ate with cutlery.

However, in most of South Asia, including India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh,

people will mostly eat directly with their hands.

If you're familiar with food from this region, this is how it was designed to be consumed.

Most meals will be some sort of curry type dish, and it will be rice and or a flatbread. The curry will be added to the rice

which serves to thicken it which makes it easy to pick up. You might be wondering

wouldn't this make your fingers really messy if you did this? In the answer is yes, but the same is true if he'd barbecue

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