On Eating Utensils / Form & Function

A while ago, Chef K brought home a little present for me -- a specially designed espresso spoon by coffee company Illy that he'd gotten from work. As you can see from this picture, it's completely flat, supposedly all the better to stir with.

I couldn't help but think this little bit of innovation was completely unnecessary. Chef K protested, "But you don't need the spoon part!" Yeah, but... what if you want to taste what you just stirred? And if it's just a stirrer, why is the end shaped like a regular spoon?

This in turn got me thinking about utensil design more broadly, and how its evolution has been shaped by not only what we eat but the very culture of how we eat -- how we sit at a table (or don't) and consume food, who we do it with and what we like to do while we're eating.

Roland Barthes famously proposes, in Mythologies, that utensils developed in a necessary and inevitable way from the specific foods eaten by specific cultures, and that such innovations are characteristic of those cultures. Thus, "aggressive" cultures in the West "naturally" created sharp implements -- forks and knives -- to spear and cut their food, while in contrast, the "delicate" cultures of the East developed chopsticks to gently separate and caress theirs. It's a poetic theory, but suspect not only because it essentializes foreign cultures but because it takes without questioning the age-old idea that form follows function.

Henry Petroski, on the other hand, argues in The Evolution of Useful Things that form does not follow function in any straightforward way, that necessity is almost never the mother of invention. Rather, desire, whimsy and, importantly, failure, more regularly dictate the twists and turns of design evolution. This would certainly seem the case when we look at the Illy spoon/stirrer.

The basic forms of the knife, fork and spoon have remained relatively unchanged for the last two centuries, even as the implements with which we cook have multiplied exponentially and grown ever more microscopic in function -- these three items (varying sometimes only by size) have continued to be our sole dining companions, while in the kitchen, we now work with not only ladles and tongs but spaghetti spoons, apple corers, avocado slicers and melon scoops.

As new culinary fashions arise -- molecular gastronomy, for example -- how will these basic eating utensils change? Are fork and spoon adequate to taste... foam? What are the best utensils to sample tiny, pulverized pieces of food, or will new ones need to be created? What will they look like -- and will they stay long in our tableware lexicon?