According to historical evidence, the Chinese have used chopsticks since the time of the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1766 - 1066 BCE). The first sticks used as eating utensils were twigs that the hungriest eaters used to scoop food into their mouths.
This invention obviously brought added convenience to eating as the sticks made it easier to handle steaming hot food. The same ingenious idea was undoubtedly conceived in other parts of the world as well, but evidence shows that elsewhere spoon-like utensils eventually achieved greater popularity at the expense of chopsticks.
The reason why chopsticks became a fixture of the Chinese table setting may be the fact that local food is often chopped up into small pieces and only rapidly heated, which makes it especially suitable for chopsticks.
Another more philosophical explanation for the development is that the revered philosopher and vegetarian Kong Zi, or Confucius, would have had antipathies towards handling knives at the dinner table.
He considered using knives to tear at food to be a show of barbarism. According to this theory then, the fact that chopsticks became the main eating utensils is evidence that civilized behavior gradually replaced a culture marked by brutish knife toting.
Whatever the truth may be, the use of chopsticks spread from China to Korea and Japan around the year 500. And the populations of these three nations have tightly held on to their chopsticks ever since.kuài zi (筷子), is made up of the character for "bamboo" on top (zhú 竹), and the character for kuài (快) meaning “quickly.”
In essence then, chopsticks are traditionally made from bamboo and you can eat fast with them. The word kuài zi can also be interpreted as referring to a "fast" (kuài) "boy" (zĭ 子). Due to this wordplay chopsticks are a great gift for newly-weds who are hoping for a male child.
Chopsticks are mainly made out of wood or bamboo, but some are also made from jade, ivory, silver, steel and nowadays even plastic. Sticks made from bamboo have the advantage of being cheap and their surface is naturally slightly coarse, which makes it easier to balance food on them.
On the other hand, these materials tend to warp and break quite easily in use, which makes a strong case for favoring chopsticks made of metal... except for the fact that they are very slippery and tend to clank against the teeth quite annoyingly.
Legend has it that Chinese emperors used to prefer silver chopsticks because the material reacted to poisons that assassins put in food by turning black.
The Chinese prefer to cook their rice quite sticky, so it is not as difficult as one might think to eat it with chopsticks. Noodle soup is also another delicacy that is eaten, true to Chinese style, quite flexibly but noisily with chopsticks. The only absolute taboo regarding chopsticks is that they should never be left to stand in the middle of a heap of rice in a bowl as this evokes food offerings and incense sticks.
Disposable chopsticks were invented at the end of the 19th century, and they soon became a hit product throughout Asia. Today, the fad for using disposable chopsticks has become a significant environmental problem, as about 45 billion pairs of them are used annually in China alone.
Producing such a huge amount of chopsticks requires 1.7 million cubic meters of wood. Last year, the central government added a five percent tax to disposable chopsticks to help curb waste.
All those thinking about traveling to China should learn to use chopsticks, as knives and forks can only be found at the classiest of restaurants. Once you get the knack of using them, it may even start to seem cruel to stick a sharp metallic object like the fork into the mouth.