The Humble Fork Was Once Considered Scandalous And Almost Sinful

The most ordinary object in your cutlery drawer was met with genuine outrage.

The fork sitting in your kitchen drawer is so ordinary you never think about it. Yet when it first arrived in parts of Europe, it caused something close to a scandal.

For centuries, people ate mostly with their hands, a knife and a spoon. When the fork appeared, many saw it as an unnecessary, showy affectation for the pampered and the vain.

Some critics reportedly went so far as to call the fork offensive, arguing that using a little tool to eat was an insult when hands had served perfectly well for generations.

Slowly, though, the fork won people over as tidier and more refined, and the outrage faded into total acceptance. Today its most controversial quality is going missing from the drawer.