Why China Uses Chopsticks

Fire is fundamental to cooking. We need flames in one way or another. Humans figured this out over half a million years years ago, and ever since have been tinkering with different ways to harness heat to cook food. Some cultures heated stones, then added them to pots of water, which would boil and poach food, some dug fire pits and buried hunks of meat; some built sophisticated stone ovens to roast, or complex chambers to smoke.

These techniques were more than just figuring out the best cooking method; instead, they were largely to do with the resources available in a region. In traditional bedouin culture, it made sense to use the earth and sand to conduct the heat of fire using holes in the ground, but in the cities of Morocco, the wood-fired public ovens were available for the community’s family tagine pots.  In England, a chicken would be roasted in the oven, in the US, sides of pork would be slow-cooked in a smoker. All of these techniques relied on slow-cooking to tease out the flavour by melting the fats and sinews until the meat slides off the bone.

There was little concern with where the fuel (usually wood) came from in these cooking methods. But that’s where Chinese culture differs. For thousands of years, fuel was scarce in China and since the Cultural Revolution, even more so, as wood and coal was funnelled into factory furnaces to produce steel or other commodities. A slow-cooked dinner would have been seen as decadent and foolish. A perfect example of this indulgence is Peking Duck. The tradition of cooking the capital’s dish is to roast it in stone ovens, burning fragrant peach or pear wood underneath the hanging ducks. For Beijingers, the extravagance of Peking Duck was exactly the point: a showy dish that officials could use to impress because no one else could afford to do it.

For most normal people, a fire for cooking needed to be fierce and quick. This meant food needed to cook as quickly as possible. A joint of meat might take two hours to cook, but tiny pieces could cook in minutes. A shorter fire was, then, much more realistic - a few twigs and a lump of coal and dinner is hot and ready.

In a resource-scarce environment, it was cheaper and easier to use human energy than natural energy to make food. If you’ve ever cooked a Chinese dish, you will have noticed that it takes a long time dicing and slicing vegetables, mixing together sauces, hacking apart meat and then marinating it beforehand. All this work when the stove is still cold.

This way of cooking also informed the utensils. A good wok is heavy and heats quickly and evenly; it can take some serious heat, giving all your ingredients wok hei (literally ‘breath of the wok, but more accurately, an even caramelisation), rather steaming until a soggy pile of veg, as is so common with food stuffed into an overcrowded frying pan.

In his stand-up, Jerry Seinfeld joked “I admire the chinese hanging in there with the chopsticks. You know, they've seen the fork.” But try and use a fork for wok-cooked food, and it’s annoying - the pieces are too small to stab or scoop. Chopsticks were invented exactly because the chef has already done the cutting for you, and all because the kitchen couldn’t afford to waste energy.