The spork’s weird history

[Karolina Dean...Big money STILL weaves a mighty web...]

The spork’s weird history
The history of the humble spoon/fork includes shocking racism and
sexism -- and a funny Bill Clinton cameo
BY BEE WILSON



Excerpted from "Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat"
Table utensils are, above all, cultural objects, carrying with them a
view of what food is and how we should conduct ourselves in relation
to it. And then there are sporks.

The term “spork” is first recorded in a dictionary in 1909, though the
first patent for one was only issued in 1970. Both the word and the
thing are a hybrid of spoon and fork. Like a pencil with an eraser on
the end, the spork is what theorists of technology call a “joined”
tool: two inventions combined. In its classical form — fashioned from
flimsy disposable plastic and given away at fast-food outlets — the
spork has the scooping bowl of a spoon coupled with the tines of a
fork. It is not to be confused with a Splayd (knife, fork and spoon in
one), a knoon, a spife or a knork.

Sporks have developed an affectionate following of a somewhat ironic
kind in our lifetime. There are several web sites devoted to them,
proffering tips on use (“Bend the prongs inward and outward and stand
the spork on end. This is a leaning tower of spork.”), haikus in their
honor (“The spork, true beauty / the tines, the bowl, the long stem /
life now is complete”) and general musings. Spork.org has this to say:

A spork is a perfect metaphor for human existence. It tries to
function as both spoon and fork, and because of this dual nature, it
fails miserably at both. You cannot have soup with a spork; it is far
too shallow. You cannot eat meat with a spork; the prongs are too
small.

A spork is not one thing or another, but in-between. In the Pixar-
animated film “Wall-E,” a robot in a postapocalyptic wasteland
attempts to clear up the detritus left behind on planet Earth by the
human race. He heroically sorts old plastic cutlery into different
compartments until he encounters a spork. His little brain cannot cope
with this new object. Does it go with the spoons? Or the forks? The
spork is uncategorizable.

Two years into his presidency, in 1995, Bill Clinton, pioneer of Third
Way politics, made the spork the centerpiece of a humorous speech to
the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C. He
claimed that the spork was “the symbol of my administration … No more
false choice between the left utensil and the right utensil.” He ended
the speech to rapturous applause and laughter: “This is a big, new
idea — the spork!”

Clinton was being funny, but the spork in its way really is a big, new
idea. Where did it come from? An urban myth circulates that sporks
were first invented by Gen. Douglas MacArthur as part of the U.S.
occupation of Japan in the 1940s. The story goes that MacArthur
decreed that chopsticks were barbarian tools, whereas forks were too
dangerous (the fear being that the conquered Japanese might rise up
and use them as weapons). Therefore, the spork was forced on the
Japanese as a safe, truncated version of Western tableware.

This story cannot be right — as mentioned above, the term “spork”
dates back to before 1909, and the form itself is still older: In 19th
century American silverware, both terrapin forks and ice-cream spoons
were sporks in all but name (they were also known as “runcible spoons”
after the Edward Lear poem). It is true that as far back as World War
I, various armies used foldable spoon-fork combinations in the mess
kit. However, these were not true sporks but rather a spoon and a fork
riveted together at the handle. These utensils are still used in the
Finnish military: They are made from stainless steel and called
Lusikkahaarukka, meaning spoon-fork.

The urban myth about MacArthur and the Japanese possibly arose because
the first person to create a hybrid fork-spoon for the mass market was
another McArthur, an Australian named Bill McArthur, of Potts Point,
New South Wales, who in 1943 launched his patented Splayd — derived
from the verb “to splay” — after seeing a magazine photo of women
awkwardly balancing knives, forks, and plates on their laps at a
party. Boxes of stainless-steel Splayds — which described themselves
as an “all-in-one knife fork and spoon gracefully fashioned” — were
marketed as the ideal solution to the newly popular Australian
barbecue. They have since become an Aussie institution, having sold
more than 5 million units.

In the 1970s, Splayds were finally joined by Sporks. The name was
trademarked in 1970 by a U.S. company (the Van Brode Milling Company)
and in 1975 by a U.K. one (Plastico Ltd.) as a combination plastic
eating utensil. It wasn’t long before they became standard issue in
fast-food restaurants. The spork made business sense: two plastic
utensils for the price of one.

Other important users of the spork included schools and prisons and
any other institutional setting where the business of feeding is
reduced to its most basic, functional level. American prison sporks
are generally plastic, orange in color and very ineffectual because it
is vital that they should not be used as weapons. In 2008, a man was
arrested in Anchorage, Alaska, for attempting an armed robbery with a
spork from a fried-chicken restaurant. The victim’s body was gashed
with four “parallel scratches.” The most remarkable thing about this
story is that anyone could have managed to do such damage with a
spork, which in its fast-food incarnation is a pitiful implement,
splintering into plastic shards on contact with any remotely
challenging food.

In 2006, the spork was given a radical reboot in an attempt to address
some of its structural shortcomings. Joachim Nordwall is a Swedish
designer employed by the outdoor supplies company Light My Fire.
Having grown up in Sweden, Nordwall had no background in using the
fast-food spork, and he was not much impressed by it. “It feels like a
compromise to me,” he noted (to which one is tempted to say: duh!).
The tines did not work well on their own terms as a fork. Nor did the
bowl really work as a spoon: When eating soup, it would dribble out
through the gaps. Nordwall’s breakthrough was to separate out the
spoon part and the fork part, placing them on opposite ends of the
handle. For good measure, he added a blade to the outer edge of the
tines, thus turning his construction into a sort of knork as well as a
spork. “Sporks get a new look,” raved a business review of Nordwall’s
design. Really, though, it was very old. Nordwall had reinvented the
double-ended medieval sucket spoon.

There is now a spork for every occasion, except a meal where any
degree of formality is required. Light My Fire sells brightly colored
sporks for campers and sporks for office workers, “lefty” sporks for
the left-handed, and “spork little” for toddlers. Unlike previous
utensils, which always carried with them some cultural expectation of
how you should behave in relation to food, the spork is entirely
devoid of culture. It bends itself to the owner, rather than the other
way around. It carries with it no particular mores and demands no
etiquette. Eating with a spork is neither mannerly nor unmannerly. One
of the many spork tributes on the Internet has fun with the notion of
table manners for “sporkware,” advising: “When using a spork to eat
mashed potatoes out of a Styrofoam container, it is common courtesy to
leave a little ‘spork waste’ at the bottom rather than scrape the
styrofoam with the spork to get every last morsel. If you must have
every little bit of potato, please use your finger.”

[Karolina Dean...Big money STILL weaves a mighty web...]