I'll admit that I have the manual dexterity of an ungulate; anyone who's listened to my guitar playing could certainly attest to my lack of digital finesse. So find chopsticks infuriating and have to be a philistine and ask for a fork. Partly this is because I like to eat like some sort of starving animal so that even when I can successfully collect food with them I am left less than impressed with the mouthfuls I get, but mostly it's just too much effort.

Now what surprises me is their popularity in South-East Asian culture. Clearly the spoon was developed because I've used those rather marvellous little ladel affairs to go through some tasty soups. So why not just use spoons?

Alternatively, in India (as I understand it) use of fingers and/or bread to eat food was the popular method, one that seems perfectly natural to me. Chopsticks seem to be a deliberate attempt to make eating food harder and I don't really understand why anyone would want to do that.

Clearly I've had one too many frustrating attempts to eat my food inside of two-minutes at restaurants.

(Yeah, I posted this on another forum too, in case anyone is surprised to find it repeated in Google...)