Real men eat with their hands and don’t keep company with people who are offended by such things.
Eating is something that most living things do every day, reptiles and super models excluded. In most cases in the animal kingdom, an animal will do whatever it damn well pleases while chowing down on its fuel of choice. But somewhere in between the days when the first humans huddled together in huts made of animal shit and tree bark to today, humans have come up with silly notions and rules as to how something should be eaten; when, where, and why. Forgive me for not playing along, but if I decide to eat something, I’m going to eat it however I want. If you don’t agree with it, don’t follow my lead. Growing up, I was always berated about my lack of table manners. I didn’t use the right fork on the right item (now I barely ever use a fork at all), and unless the food on my plate was designated “finger food”, I wasn’t allowed to use my hands. I couldn’t wipe the crumbs on my shirt, and I had to censor what I said in between or during mouthfuls of steak. If I had to get up to refill my drink, I had to ask to be excused first. It is though much rational though and my eye towards efficiency that I realized early on in life that whoever made up these rules of etiquette was completely, utterly, irrevocably full of shit. In fact, most concepts about eating in general are. Have you ever looked around your kitchen and seen all of the stupid, meaningless crap people spend good money on to try and be “proper” when they eat? Why do you need different sized spoons for different kinds of food? Why do you need spoons at all? Why do different glasses of different sizes and different shapes need to be used to drink different kinds of liquid? If I feel like putting my beer, wine, water, or juice in the same-shaped glass, what difference does it make?
So I can more effectively show all of you cretins the light, let me break down for you some of the dumb things people use around the kitchen table:
Knives – Knives in and of themselves are okay, because they are used predominantly for stabbing and cutting apart meat. Whether that meat belongs to some dipshit who cut you off on the freeway or some tender, juicy cow that was gracious enough to let you eat them is irrelevant. The latter situation is the most acceptable way to use a knife in the kitchen, though it is not the sole purpose of such a graceful and ageless tool. Use your knife at the kitchen table for a variety of things including, but not limited to:
• Spearing chunks of burned meat and putting them in your mouth (see Fork)
• Threatening whoever tries to take food off of your plate
• Picking your teeth
• Silencing any limps who complain about your “lack of table manners”
• Circumcising your children
For real man points, carry that same knife around in your pockets and use them at work to cut open boxes, pick dirt from your fingernails, and for shaving your neck and ass. With a little imagination, there will be no end to what you can use the same knife for.
Spoons – Essentially a miniature shovel used, in fact, to shovel whatever craptastic lumps of tepid garbage passes for food in this day and age into the gaping mouth of whatever dumb fuck was suckered into paying money to buy spoons in the first place. You know when I use spoons? When I feel like it, which is never. Eating cereal? Don’t be a bitch, use your hands. Eating soup? Grow a pair and drink it right from the bowl (or for added man points, from the jagged edge of the can it came in). Spoons are for yuppies. And don’t even get me started on sporks. What the hell is everyone’s obsession with sporks anyway? What the fuck is so god damned funny about the concept of a spork? Never mind the fact that they are useless as either utensil they try to be. The fork prongs aren’t long enough to effectively poke your food with, and the fact that the spoon had to have notches cut into it to sporkify it in the first place negates its effectiveness as a spoon, so all you are left with is the knowledge that you’re dumb for using one in the first place. Have you such little mental capacity that the concept of a spoon with prongs is enough to entertain you? I’ll wager it’s a good thing sporks aren’t effective for eating soup with, or some of you brainhazards may drown in the attempt.
Forks – Used mostly to either spear meat so you can bring it up to your mouth, which you can use your aforementioned knife for, or for spearing leafy greens and other hippie bullshit, which real men shouldn’t be eating anyway. Vegetables are for pussies. I haven’t had a vegetable since 1997, and when I got my BMI calculated last week, I was 60% muscle, 30% raw testosterone, and 10% razor-sharp wit. I dare you to find a healthier male. The only time it is permissible to use a fork is when the only other option is a set of chopsticks. And speaking of salad, why do people love ranch dressing so much? It looks like dirty bear semen. Anything that reminds me of semen, in any way, isn’t allowed in my house, unless it’s your mother’s face.
And chopsticks, I would say don’t even get me started on chopsticks, but it’s too late for that. It is a well known fact that the Japanese are stupid. Aside from their soft, pale, weak and callow population of males who are so afraid of real women that their porn doesn’t even feature them, what was once one of the most advanced nations in the world was unable to come up with an eating utensil more advanced than what equates a pair of broken tweezers. Sometimes I think chopsticks are Japan’s way of getting back at gullible Americans for bombing Hiroshima, like it is some giant prank pulled by an entire country to watch a bunch of hip assholes make themselves look like idiots in public. Then again, if the Japanese were that smart, they’d have known better than to fuck with us in the first place in WWII.
Have you ever eaten ANYTHING with chopsticks? No you haven’t, because it is almost impossible to efficiently bring any quantity of food to your mouth with such an archaic and stupid system of utensils. Sure, you may have tried and tried and tried to master the “art” of chopsticks so you can pass yourself off as some kind of cultured, non-xenophobic douche bag, but you probably never did end up figuring out the secret to it because you were too much of a stupid shit to realize that the secret of chopsticks is to use a fucking fork instead. I think if every anime convention in the world had a big sign posted above the front door that said “It’s ok to use a fork,” the collective anxiety level of nerds everywhere would dial back significantly. And for the record, anime sucks.
Another unnecessary piece of dining room equipment is the napkin. Unless you eat dinner in the nude, congratulations, you are wearing a napkin somewhere on your body. And if you want to lick your fingers before wiping them off, do so. Whoever complains about it should be informed that whatever remnant of barbecue sauce you sucked out from underneath your fingernail gives you more fulfillment in life than their trite company, and that you kindly suggest they go swimming with a plugged-in toaster.
One thing I was always lectured on when I was growing up was the use of appropriate dinnertime conversation. Apparently, it is okay to take an animal that had its guts ripped out, got ground into little chunks and thrown into a fire and use your teeth to strip its flesh from the bone so it can have its nutrients sucked out before being mashed through a bunch of small, slimy tubes and shit back out into a bucket of water, but it isn’t okay to talk about how much your balls itched at work that day. If I want to talk about the last time I got my hemorrhoids licked by a hooker, what better time than at dinner, when the whole family is gathered around the same place to hear? And if someone else’s conversation gets interrupted by a loud burp or a dick scratch, remove the stick from your ass before normal human processes offend you. If something of mine itches, I’m gonna fucking scratch it because my personal comfort is more important than you telling me how much your day sucked, you pretentious tramp. If it is socially acceptable for you to make yourself vomit after a meal so you feel prettier, it should be acceptable for me to fart to make room for more food.
The bottom line is this: eat like a fucking man. Besides, by removing all of the stupid, useless clutter from your kitchen, you are doing your significant other a favor by giving them less to clean after dinner, thereby giving them more time to service you for dessert. It may just be the most considerate thing you’ve done for her since you bought her off of your neighbor.