THE ECONOMIC ROOTS OF THE AMERICAN “ZIGZAG”: KNIVES, FORKS, AND BRITISH MERCANTILISM

The castaways on Gilligan's Island encounter an ape-man named "TONGO" and prepare a meal for him. Mr. and Mrs. HOWELL set a proper dinner table and sit him down to teach some basic etiquette. MRS. HOWELL Now we'll see where he comes from. If he eats with the fork in his left hand, that indicates a European background. If in his right, he's an American. TONGO briefly surveys the table settings and food, then grabs the food with his bare hands and shoves it into his mouth. MR. HOWELL Heavens, a Yale man! (1) I. THE APPETIZER Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Britain wove a complex tapestry of mercantilist legislation to ensure that raw materials flowed from colonies to the mother country and that manufactured goods flowed in the opposite direction. Ultimately, 340 different pieces of legislation--known collectively as the Navigation Acts--were enacted to regulate this economic relationship. To Adam Smith (1776), these Navigation Acts were "impertinent badges of slavery, imposed ... by the groundless jealousy of merchants and manufactures" (239). Whether the Navigation Acts were sufficiently burdensome to the colonial economy to have triggered the American Revolution has long been a matter of heated debate among economic historians. They have worked for generations to compile and refine evidence of the actual economic burden these "badges of slavery" imposed on the American colonies (e.g., McClelland 1969, 1973; Nettels 1952; Sawers 1992; Thomas 1965; Walton 1971, 1973). Most now believe that the overall costs imposed by the Navigation Acts were small (Whaples 1995). In this flurry of evidence and counterevidence of the aggregate effect of the Navigation Acts, we may have missed an admittedly trivial but far more enduring impact of British mercantilism-one that continues to shape the table manners of millions of Americans at every meal of every day: the distinctively American custom of switching the fork from the left to the right hand after" cutting meat. In contrast to this "zigzag" eating (Post 1928, 611), Europeans tend to keep their fork in the left hand for both cutting and eating. James Deetz, a founding father of historical archeology and renowned specialist in colonial America, attributed these differences in table manners to the belated arrival of the table fork in America and concluded that this "is one more American idiosyncrasy arising from isolation during that period" (Deetz and Grey 1996, 170). This essay supplements Deetz' theory by offering an economic explanation for Americans' belated adoption of the fork as a common table utensil. II. TABLE FORKS ARRIVE IN EUROPE Deetz and Grey's (1996) explanation hinges on the evolving use and design of the table fork in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Petroski (1994) complements this explanation with a description of the evolving "symbiotic relationship" between the table fork and the knife during this time. While forks were familiar cooking tools well before this time and were likely invented shortly after humans began cooking meat over fires, they were previously unfamiliar to most Europeans as table utensils. Prior to the appearance of the table fork, Europeans used a pointed knife to cut, spear, and eat meat. After touching meat with fingers became taboo, they began using a second knife in the passive hand to hold the meat while cutting (Elias 1939). Yet, knives-especially pointed ones--were unsettling table utensils because they looked like weapons and connoted violence. (2) One could soften this symbolism by producing table knives with rounded tips, which is precisely what Europeans did to the passive knife used to hold meat (Petroski 1994). The cutting knife, in the other hand, had to spear food and so retained its unsettling pointed tip. The first table fork to appear in Europe seems to have arrived in Italy in the fourteenth century with a princess from Byzantium, where table forks had been used since at least the seventh century (Flandrin, Montanari, and Sonnenfeld 1999; Giblin 1987). …