Michael

You are a ham.

SultanOfSwing

Maybe a bit ...

Michael

That's why you like a bit of ham.

AlphaTangoMike

I'm not sure if someone has posted this before (despite many years of lurking, I can't recall seeing it mentioned): What is up with the weird cutlery skills in America? I.e. fork in the right hand, hacking at something with a knife and then switching hands. As Dlake02 mentioned in his 'post' today, eating like a JCB, a very apt analogy, the way that food is scooped / shoveled.

fozzyb

In terms of calories delivered per second it seems a highly optimized engineering solution.

AlphaTangoMike

It certainly is optimized for delivering maximum calories. The process can be quite painful to watch, especially when you include the other bizarre habit of taking a mouthful of water with each forkful of food.

Pulaski

It's been covered a number of times, including lengthy treatises defending the practice by Michael and RoadWarriorFromLP.

SultanOfSwing

All that hand swapping really isn't very efficient though. It would take twice the amount of time to eat something that way, compared to keeping the fork in your left hand and the knife in the right the whole time.

Never seen that

AlphaTangoMike

Fair enough. I'm glad that others have noticed it. I thought that I was being overly pedantic, or that my parents had perhaps gone overboard with table manners.

fozzyb

With practice the hand swapping can be done concurrently to the swallowing, keeping it off the critical path.

(and for us lefties - there is nowt wrong with keeping the fork in the right hand the whole time )

SultanOfSwing

Honestly, I wouldn't care if they used their feet to hold the knife and fork, if they'd all just keep their ****ing mouths closed while they chewed

That being said, I was just back in the UK and the noise my sister made when she was eating was mental. Plebs.

AlphaTangoMike

This is where I notice the concurrent food & water intake. When chewing with an open mouth (and then naturally attempting to speak), a gulp of water assists in lubricating the pie hole, making the half chewed food easier to swallow / speak through.

Sally Redux

It's like no-one ever made it out of the remedial class in eating.

Pulaski

After 3½ years of daycare and 2+ years of school, little Miss P is no better at handling a knife and fork, now, at the age of 7 than she was at the time of her second birthday!

It has been a long, slow, and sometimes painful process but at last little Miss P is set to surpass the previous high water mark in cutlery manipulation which she set when she reached her second birthday.

Sally Redux

Why bother if she's staying there?

It's funny when you see toddlers effortlessly manipulating chopsticks.