Oh, Europeans! While Americans fumble with chopsticks in Asians restaurants, reminding everyone how smug they are because they are being multi-cultural by using unfamiliar new eating utensils, the Europeans are just straight-up designing different interfaces to eat Asian food entirely. (Or as we Asian-Americans call it, food.)
Take for example the TUKAANI, a “hand made eating device for Asian food consumers in the West,” developed by Ugandan-born Finnish designer Lincoln Kayiwa to be used as an unspoken alternative to chopsticks. The design may be inspired by a toucan’s bill, but it looks more like a pair of salad tongs that curves like a dildo. (What, you don’t see it? It totally does.) Thankfully, it’s hand-washable, something disposable wooden chopsticks don’t have the luxury of being. Someone should come up with metal chopsticks or something.
But at least the TUKAANI looks sophisticated and classy (well, as sophisticated as curved salad tongs can look); behold, the Chopsticks Aid, where a Polish guy named Jaroslav Kucera designed this spork-like attachment which, combined with a pair of chopsticks, gives anyone the ability to stab peeled edamame and fish balls — so long as you can withstand the looks of judgment from everyone else in the restaurant.
So the question becomes this: what’s more embarssing — watching white people eat sushi or noodles or a bowl of rice with something that looks like it came from the Maker Faire? Or having them play the drums or doing the walrus face before their meal?
(Hat tip: Jun, via the 8asians tumblr)
