Fingers win the eating debate hands down

It is funny how many people (including in India) think using chopsticks or balancing peas on the tines of a fork are refined but eating with fingers is declasse. They are delusional. Or, maybe just ignorant. The fact is chopsticks can be managed by anyone just by joining them together with a rubber band. And pea-balancing is hardly a useful skill. But eating with fingers needs training, and once mastered, is the most efficient and stimulating way to ingest food.

In fact, the act of eating with fingers is nothing short of food yoga. Not only do the five fingers crucial to the exercise represent the five elements-earth fire, water, wind and ether-but the sensitive nerve endings on their tips make the sensory appreciation of comestibles even more acute. And fine motor skills are required to ensure viands of all sizes, textures and temperatures are properly mixed, apportioned and then conveyed to the mouth without spillage.

Hygiene and safety benefits of eating with fingers far outstrip those achieved by using spoons, forks and knives. Hands are always washed before and after eating; that cleanliness cannot always be guaranteed when it comes to metal or plastic cutlery. Mouths are also invariably rinsed out after meals along with hands, ensuring that no food particles ferment into bacteria later; this habit of oral hygiene, sadly, is hardly practised in most cutlery-using cultures.


Right hands are the norm for eating and that is not peculiar to India; it is preferred wherever this practice has survived the colonial onslaught of spoons and forks around the world. And it applies equally to those who eat rice, millets and cassava as well as flatbreads and breads. Indeed, eating with fingers is a practice that unites the 'Global South' rather than merely economic parameters, and is an important but long undervalued common cultural attribute.

Dexterity is key. Rending flatbreads into appropriate wedges using just the fingers of one hand requires a delicate pas de deux between the thumb and fingers, as does the sectioning of vegetables and meats/fish and smushing rice or cassava with lentils or soft vegetables. It is rare for even the smallest fish bone to get past divining fingers to lodge in throats; there is also no question of scalded lips or tongues either, due to ingestion of food at the wrong temperature.

Westerners do eat some items with their fingers, but those require only minimal skill. They use fingers stiffly like tongs or clamps to pick up, hold and convey, leaving their mouths to do the job of segmenting the fruit, sandwich, burger, burrito, bruschetta, pizza or whatever. They are unable to flex their fingers and thumb in concert to scoop, prod, squish, roll and section food and then propel it into the cavum oris with a smooth sweep of the digitus primus manus.

Of the three western eating implements, only the spoon has really made inroads into India, partly due to convenience and partly as part of the globalised ethic. But it has not yet supplanted fingers: Indians use whichever is convenient. It is unfortunate that some Indians prefer spoons over fingers as their primary eating implement considering even the Mughals, whom many consider to be the epitome of sophistication, ate those elaborate biryanis and kormas with fingers!

It's taken a canny Ugandan-Indian-American on the campaign trail in New York to reignite the cutlery versus fingers debate. If it gains more momentum, constituents of the Global South everywhere may realise what really unites them culturally even if they remain disadvantaged in economic terms. The Filipino Tagalog language has a pretty word for eating with fingers: Kamayan. Imagine how formidable a worldwide Kamayan Coalition could become...