@weddige@gruene.social @hacks4pancakes@infosec.exchange Amazing. Thanks for the Wikipedia link. I immediately set off to find footage of Americans eating. Naïvely I searched for "Americans eating". I got *almost exclusively* people shoving hamburgers into their mouths. I added "with a knife and fork" and got *almost exclusively" etiquette videos, with everything done step by excruciating step, often with no actual food shown, and tedious discussions of a zillion tiny points of detail (Don't saw the knife! Don't pull the fork! Don't jab! Don't move towards the fork!) that I am absolutely certain no normal person (or even American) would pay any attention to at all. Nevertheless, based on this information, I have provisionally assumed that Americans are mad. This is of course a little unfair, so I will reserve final judgement until I have seen real Americans eating something a) other than hamburger and b) with a knife and fork. Do, please, feel free to send a link if you know of a good video showing Americans eating in their natural habitat. I am slighly concerned that henceforth I will be unable to enjoy any American movies involving meals, so fixated will I be on the orbits and trajectories of the cutlery. Speaking of mad, though, my mother absolutely never, ever, turned her fork tines-up. Food was either speared by the tines, or stacked on the back of the tines. This was obviously daft and for many foods, such as green peas, was very much suboptimal. I feel there is a nascent hypothesis here, something about mashed potato and/or gravy, but it's not quite clear yet. From Wikipedia: 'In defense of the traditional American style, Judith Martin wrote, "Those who point out that the European manner is more efficient are right. Those who claim it is older or more sophisticated—etiquette has never considered getting food into the mouth faster a mark of refinement—are wrong."' In defence of the rest of the fork-using world, I wish to point out that Judith Martin, an American, is wrong. It's not about getting food into the mouth faster. It may not be older (though I suspect it is). But it is is clearly more sophisticated, more efficient (and, dammit, more sensible!) not to pointlessly and possibly dangerously throw hardware from hand to hand, unnecessarily putting down and picking up the same utensil dozens of times.