Stuff You Should Know - Chopsticks > Forks

Episode Date: March 17, 2020

Today Chuck and Josh sit and converse on the simple, elegant chopstick.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know, all about the song Chopsticks. I wonder if you're gonna make a joke about that.

Jerry beat me to it. And when she was like, what are we recording today? And I told her, she's like, the song? Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. It's a great song. No, it's dun, dun, dun, dun. Oh, is that Chopsticks? Aren't there two Chopsticks? No, I'm just teasing, that's heart and soul.

Oh, okay, so what I said from big, that was Chopsticks, right? Totally, yeah. Robert, Robert Lozia? Yeah, man. I should have continued trolling and said James Kahn. Oh, wow, that is a very James Kahn-like role, though, isn't it? Totally.

I think he played that role. In Bottle Rocket? In, well, he's a crime boss in Bottle Rocket. Yeah, sort of, well, not sort of, truly. We watched Misery the other day, still holds up. Oh, man. I remember seeing that for the first time in Athens when I was in college.

So great. Kathy Bates can do no wrong. She did great, but if you watch James Kahn, he did really well, too. Like, his whole kind of trepidatious manner toward her was really well done and not overdone at all. And like, he did a great job as well. And he had to lay there in a bed for weeks and weeks

and act. Yeah, sounds like a dream. Yeah, and if he balked at it, they would attach a catheter to him and make him pee in his own mouth as punishment. Little known fact about that movie. Oh, so chopsticks. Right.

We should point out here that in researching this, chopsticks and customs and etiquette, if we covered all the countries and all that stuff that use chopsticks, we'd be here all day. So there's kind of a focus here on Japan for the most part. Well, Japan, they seem to be a little, the most sensitive to transgressions with chopsticks

out of all of the Asian cultures, I think. Perhaps. They have the most rules against them at the very least. Yeah, but when you read them, they could all be summed up as, just don't be a dumb American. Yeah, or don't have any fun whatsoever with your chopsticks is another way to put it.

You're like, what's wrong with making them antennas in a restaurant and going, meep, mark, meep? Right, I'm a walrus now. Why can't I be a walrus? Right. But we are talking chopsticks, not the song. Sorry to disappoint you, everybody, but I saw that that song is actually called Chopsticks

because it was originally called the Celebrated Chop Waltz, okay? Written by a 16-year-old schoolgirl from England. Seems about right. Sure, but we're talking about the utensils, and when you think chopsticks, obviously you think Asia, and you don't think that there was ever anything

but chopsticks in the history of Asia. And while chopsticks are actually surprisingly old, I think they go back about 7,000 years. I also saw 5,000 years. I'm going with seven. I think they're actually about as ancient as that. They weren't like the go-to utensil for Asia until this millennium.

Yeah, the spoon was kind of the go-to. Yeah, who knew? The word chopstick, they think, may be pigeon English, Chinese pigeon English, meaning chop chop or quickly. Right. You know, this is one of these etymologies that's sort of tough to pin down, it looks like.

But that's the English word for it, and all of the chopstick-using cultures, they have their own word, like in Japan, it's hashie. It's kuayi zi in China. Nice. I'm not sure if I said that right at all. Geo garak in Korean. All right, not as nice.

And doi dua in Vietnamese. I'm sorry, half of the world's population. I love that you started strong in Japan though, because you feel pretty confident in your Japanese pronunciations, that's a good way to go. Yes, I have a great tutor. That's right. So, five to 7,000 years ago,

they were used initially for cooking, and we'll get more into the ins and outs of the history, but they were made from twigs, probably, and it was much, much later, like you said, that they were table utensils. Right. And it was all very much like practicality-based. Yeah, because initially,

they figured out pretty early on, the Chinese from 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, that's a really bad idea to stick your hand into a pot of boiling water to get something out of it, say like a bone or a piece of meat or something like that. It's way better to use a twig, and it's even better to use two twigs as if they were kind of a pair of detached tweezers.

Sure. And that's apparently where they initially started to come into use, was during cooking and food preparation, not the actual eating process. That's right. There was a big population boom in China at one point. Some might say they're continues to be.

Some might say. And the resources became a little more scarce. They started cutting their food up into little tiny pieces for reasons of like, it helps it to cook faster. Right. I wonder, I didn't see anything about this, but I wonder if that also just made it more shareable among a larger family.

I could see that, that's a great point too. And isn't it fascinating though, the idea that a population boom led to widespread use of the chopstick? Yeah, it's interesting. And then Confucius also was a vegetarian and noted knife hater. He has a quote about knives,

the honorable and upright man keeps well away from both the slaughterhouse and the kitchen. And he allows no knives on his table. And I think that was a little more because a knife was equated with eating meat. Right. Less than like, it's a garbage tool. You don't need a knife to eat a plant, basically.

Yeah, some might argue you might want to cut a piece of broccoli. Maybe, but you don't have to. I just summed up Confucius. That's the level of arrogance that I'm operating in now. And I think some of the early, and it started in China, and then pretty soon Korea, Vietnam, Japan,

we're all using them. But I think that Chinese chopsticks were joined at, what are they called now, if they're joined? And you got to split them apart? Where is it? Oh, Warabashi, that's Japanese. This is the term for disposable chopsticks. Okay, but I thought the Chinese chopsticks

were originally joined like that, yes? No, it was Japanese. Okay. There was a single piece of bamboo that was like split, kind of like giant tweezers. Okay, yeah, I'm reading this now. I had a, sometimes I can't tell the truth. Wait, you're just now reading this, Chuck?

Well, no, I get sometimes, and it's the dumbest thing, but I get confused between former and latter. Oh, yeah. It's not that I get confused, I just have to go back and sort of picture it in my brain. It just takes an extra second, I think, for everybody. That's right. It's definitely not intuitive, so I don't feel bad.

I also thought this thing about food poisoning was interesting, was that in dynastic times in China, they would use, and I guess people that are a little more well-healed would use silver chopsticks, because they thought that if it came into contact with something that was poisonous, then the chopsticks would turn black

and they would know not to eat it. I mean, it just makes sense. When you're rich and wealthy, more people want to kill you, so it's better to have something that shows if somebody's trying to poison you, like your chopsticks turning a color if you're being poisoned with cyanide or something like that.

The problem is it doesn't actually work, and I don't know why they didn't just think that through from the get-go, like, oh, well, let's get ourselves some cyanide and stick a silver chopstick in it and see what happens and see that it doesn't work, but apparently it does work in the presence of garlic or rotten eggs because they put out hydrogen sulfide, so it will turn silver a different color.

So I don't know how garlic ever made itself into a staple of Chinese cooking, but there we have it. Yeah, and the other thing I thought was interesting, and we should mention too, this came from a variety of places. Tegan Jones at Gizmodo, Lisa Bramon from Smithsonian Mag, Q. Edward Wang from Cambridge Blog, Huff Poe, believe it or not, got in the works. Yeah.

And some other places, but I thought that Q. Edward Wang's history was really interesting because he mentions that wheat is kind of the first reason before rice, which really surprised me. It was very surprising. I think he knew all along that that was a big reveal, you know?

Yeah. But that's what gave chopsticks a shot in the arm. So first we have cutting food into smaller pieces to have it cook faster, so you use less firewood, because there's a population boom. And then as wheat becomes kind of fashionable and widespread, you start to use chopsticks because you're making things like noodles and dumplings.

And prior to this, millet was the go-to grain, and millet's really small. It's much smaller than rice, and you certainly aren't gonna turn it into like a noodle or a dumpling. You make a gruel out of it. And so for thousands of years, the go-to utensil that people used to eat with in China

was a spoon, because they were eating gruel or porridge or whatever and everybody hated life. But when wheat came along and they started turning it into noodles and dumplings, they said, oh yeah, remember those things that we use, those twigs to cook with? What if we made a smaller version of those to eat with too? And that's where the chopsticks, it's first like real boost

in usage around Asia. Yeah, I mean, try to eat a big spoonful of noodles and just watch as they flop off and sling delicious sauce all over the place. There is literally nothing more frustrating than trying to eat noodles with a spoon in the entire world. Yeah, and I mean, sure, you could chop them up

into tiny little pieces so they rest in your spoon with some broth. Sure. But who wants to do that? Like the person that cuts up their buskete at the table into tiny bits is a six-year-old. Yeah, or just thoroughly un-American. True.

One of the two. Maybe both, depending on how sophisticated the six-year-old is, you know? The other thing I thought was interesting too from Mr. Wang's article was he talked about stew, which is gang in Chinese. They ate a lot of stew back then and chopsticks would be very useful

for picking up things like the more solid objects in the stew, like the vegetables. Right, so you've got wheat coming into vogue, you've got smaller pieces, vegetables stew being eaten, chopsticks are like, come on, we're gonna do it, we gotta do this, we just need one more thing to get us over the hump and people are gonna know us everywhere around the world.

And that one thing was a particular kind of Vietnamese rice that ripens early, apparently. And it's a shorter grain or a medium grain, which means that it's easier to, it clumps more easily. It also has a lot of starches to it. So it's just kind of clumpy, sticky rice. And here in the West, we're not really used to that kind of rice.

So we're like, how are you gonna use chopsticks to eat this stuff? Try eating some Uncle Ben's with chopsticks. You can't do it. It's like trying to eat noodles with a spoon. Yeah, or you would just do that move. And this is what I didn't understand when I was growing up, because I was a little naive.

When I saw chopsticks, I would just think about scooping up the rice on top of them very awkwardly. And it wasn't until I was a little bit older and had good, clumpy Chinese rice and Japanese rice. So it's like, oh, it's very easy to eat with chopsticks. Yeah, and you're just like, oh, okay, I've got it. Because it sticks together. It's like a nice little morsel of food.

And it sticks together just about the right size. And it's totally different. So when you eat Chinese rice or Japanese rice or even Vietnamese rice, the stickier rice, then you understand, okay, you can use chopsticks for this. And the Chinese figured this out as well when rice became much more of a staple of the Asian diet. And all of a sudden now, you didn't need a spoon anymore

because everybody's like, to heck with millet, who wants gruel, nobody. So they threw their spoons out the window. And then they started just eating chopsticks for everything. You could use it for everything now. It's all you needed for your meal. Yeah, and that all in one solution, I think was, that happened in China and Japan and Vietnam for sure.

And Korea, I think was the one standout because I believe in Korea, the spoon and the chopstick still go hand in hand. Yeah, and this, I believe it was Q. Edward Wang who maybe wrote this, but he basically said, it seems to be a conscious decision. Right, in Korea. Almost as if they were being contrary

or something like that. Maybe they just want to do their own thing. Well, they eat a lot of very, very hot stews and soups. Have you ever had budae jjigae? I don't think so. I'm not even sure I'm saying it correctly. Have you ever been to eat at like a H Mart or like a Asian food court or something like that?

Sure. If you go to a Korean place, they usually have, I think it's called budae jjigae. It's like hot dog soup basically. Oh my Lord. And it's like this kind of, I'm not even sure. I guess it's like a chili paste broth with lots of great processed meat in it and like ramen

and like jalapenos, it's just so good. But that thing comes to you boiling and you're supposed to like eat the chunky parts out with a chopstick, but I guess it always comes with a spoon too, so I think you're supposed to actually eat the broth with the spoon rather than sip. Man, I tell you one thing I do love is the design of the, and I'm calling it the Chinese spoon.

I don't know if it originated in China, but you know the soup spoon I'm talking about. Yeah, like the one you use for miso soup. Oh man, they're just the best. Yeah, they do, because you can get a really big spoonful on there, you know? It's ergonomic, it's the way to do it unless you're just gonna pick up the bowl

and drink it, which is great too. Yeah, up with the miso soup spoon. All right, let's take a break, because I'm so hungry after you said hot dog stew. Why is stomach's growling? And we'll come back and we'll talk more about chopsticks. commercial credits plays on theER 네!!!!

On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasscher and Christine Taylor. Stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound, like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Music I don't remember what episode it was, Chuck,

but do you remember when our stomachs growled in sync with one another? That was very recently. It was. Yeah. You can still reminisce about recent stuff. I say. I'm nostalgic for that thing that happened last week.

Pretty much. So apparently, and this, I'm not sure how accurate this is, but the four main kinds of chopsticks, apparently, in China, the chopsticks are a little bit longer and a little more blunt on the ends. Yeah, and they think that might be a nod to Confucius basically saying like, don't have knives at your table. Don't even have vaguely sharpened chopsticks even.

Like nothing stabby. Nothing. You don't want to be stabbed at your table. I think in Japan, they're a little sharper and a little shorter, but you're still not supposed to be stabbing stuff. No. Don't stab that piece of tuna. No, you can just tell if you've ever done that

while you're doing it, that you're violating some unnatural law or something like that. It feels wrong, doesn't it? Yeah. Let me see here. In Korea, apparently, they are shorter as well, and they are also blunt, but they can be metallic. Yeah, that's one thing that we'll see because we're going

to talk about, as with everything in existence, there's some horrid environmental impact with chopsticks as well. But the Japanese are like, give us cheap disposable wooden or bamboo chopsticks and basically nothing else. They're just crazy for it, whereas some of the other Asian cultures are like, no, we can use reusable ones. But the Japanese are like, no, we want nothing but disposable

cheap chopsticks that Warabashi. I assume that you and Yumi have your own chopsticks at home. Oh, yeah. And do you bring those to restaurants? Oh, no. No. No, never do. We should.

No, I know the feeling. Everybody should, but it's- I usually think when I'm there, I'm like, man, I should have brought my chopsticks. Well, you know, I mean, if you go to any Asian store, they have cute little, it looks almost like a pencil case, but it's chopsticks inside and it's meant for you to carry them around with you.

But no one does that. You just don't, even though hopefully in 10 years, when we're all like, OK, this is out of control and this is really bad, everyone will be doing that. You just don't do it. And yeah, we have some that I could just put in my jeans pocket and walk around with if I wanted to, but I don't do it, no one does.

I take my straw now and I use it because I now keep it in my purse. Your purse? My purse, which goes everywhere with me. So I need to throw some chopsticks in there. Sure. And it's a good feeling when you say, no straw, I've got my own. And I would love to be able to say, no, no,

you keep those wooden chopsticks. Yeah. Take that straw and shove it where the sun don't shine. Wow, I'm not that aggressive about this. It's so funny, depending on where you are in the country, though, if they bring you a straw and you say, no straw, please, they look at you like you're just a straight up democratic socialist hippie, like you're

trying to undermine the government or something like that, it's kind of hilarious. Yeah, sure. But other places now are, there's a couple of places in my neighborhood who have postings on the wall when you walk in talking about the impact of straws and that straws are upon request only.

Right. And if you got a problem with that, you can take a straw and shove it where the sun don't shine. Right. Or you take that problem to the voting booth this fall. Right. Exactly. So are you prepared, because I have a feeling

you do a better job than me at this, because you so often have great convoluted ways of describing visual things. I'm going to do a great job describing it to you, because you can watch my hands. But I think for everybody listening, it's going to be very problematic. All right. How do you use chopsticks?

All right. I'm going to get you back for this one, Chuck. I did it intuitively, by the way, which is what I suggest. Yeah. I never read a thing. Watch some people. I think reading it and having it explained makes it way harder. I agree.

I think it's just one of those things you have to watch somebody do in practice. I mean, it's just all practice. But essentially, there's a couple things to remember, is that both chopsticks are laying. Do you want to go step-by-step through it? No, I think I want the Josh method. OK.

Well, it's the same method. Or it's a Josh description. OK. So in the valley between your thumb and your forefinger? Yeah. OK. The webbing right there? Uh-huh.

That's where the chopsticks rest. The thumbtaint. The thumbtaint, the jode, that your hand showed. Oh my god. Hand showed, great band name. It really is. Wow. So the two chopsticks lay right there.

OK? OK. One of them, the bottom one, is basically meant to be immobile and stationary. Yes. It just basically stays there. And it's the top one that you're moving, you're kind of holding with your forefinger, your index

finger, and your middle finger. That's what you're using to move this top one. And so it's really the bottom one that stays basically stationary. And the top one is the one that's moving. And you're just using it to kind of pick up and tweeze food or rice or whatever with it. If you get really good, you can pick your friend up with it.

Right. Or catch a fly. If you're a sensei level with chopsticks, for sure. But that's essentially it. And you don't want to hold it too tightly. If you're gripping it too tightly, or your muscles are too tense, you're not going to be able to kind of make that tweezer motion very

easily, or you're certainly not going to have much control. It's kind of paradoxical that the looser you have your hand to a certain degree, the more control you have over the chopsticks and the tension that you're directing toward the end of the chopstick. So keep your hand loose, but in control. And just make sure you remember that the bottom one that's

kind of resting all the way along your thumb, the freeloader, is basically stationary. And the top one is the one you're directing with your index finger and middle finger. Yeah, I recommend halfway through your meal, switch those two out. Because that bottom one is just along for the ride. Yeah.

And it needs to do a little work, you know what I mean? Yeah. So just switch them out and make that one the topper. And give it, make it, do a little sweating. I think that's pretty good, Chuck. Do a little sweat. I think we deserve a Peabody Award for describing how to use chopsticks with no visuals.

You did talk about the environmental impact a little bit, but it is a real problem. I mean, you see these tiny little things, and you think, what's the big whoop? Like a tree can probably make a gazillion chopsticks. So they need like maybe 10 trees in China to make all the chopsticks they need. Do you remember that, just one thing,

do you remember that cartoon? It might have been a Simpsons or something like that, where they chop down a tree and they show them processing one single tree into just an individual toothpick? No. That's pretty sure it had to be the Simpsons, you know? But imagine if they're like, no, we make one chopstick out of just a single tree.

I didn't think about toothpicks, man. How many toothpicks can you get out of a tree? I don't even know. They're problem, they're on the horizon. Right. But when you think about the fact that China alone produces 80 billion disposable chopsticks every year, then you get a little bit more of a sense of exactly

how many of these trees, and it says here, there was, I'm trying to find out what year this is. It was fairly recently, but they've had like parliamentary meetings and stuff about this in China. And they estimated that it takes about 20 million, 20 year old trees to cover their annual rate of production. Yeah, a guy named Bai Wajin. Pretty sure I said his last name correctly.

He's like a representative from the Zhilin Forestry Industry Group, and he really like rocked everybody at a parliamentary meeting where he basically said, hey, do you remember that old figure that everybody has been touting for years, that we actually use 57 billion chopsticks a year, produce 57 billion chopsticks a year? He said, that's way off. It's actually 80 billion.

And like you just said, we need 20 million 20 year old trees to meet that a year. Yeah. And people said, wow, that's kind of a problem. And so around the world, like China, so of that 80 billion, I think China, half of them stays in China. Of the other half. Yeah, I wondered about that.

77% goes to Japan. Okay. And Japan was actually the one that started all this. They came up with disposable chopsticks, Wari Bashi, all the way back in 1878. And it's just been crazy for him ever since. Like you can go to like a pretty high end restaurant in Japan and they're going to have wooden chopsticks.

That you pull apart. They do chopsticks. Yeah, that you would pull apart. There are also plenty of restaurants in Japan that have reusable ones and they're much more elegant or whatever, but it's not like, you wouldn't just walk in and be like, what is this disposable chopsticks?

Are you kidding? Cause they're just such a part of Japanese culture. So they use 77% of the other half. Korea uses 21% and then 2% comes to the United States. Is that all? And I have to catch that that was 2011 figures, which is the latest I could find. Yeah, I'm kind of surprised that I would think China

and Japan, it would just seem like they would, like everyone would have their own and it would be a very like prideful thing to take care of your chopsticks and to have something cool looking. It just kind of surprises me that they're so down with the disposable. It surprises a lot of people,

especially Japan is like really well known for being meticulous with recycling and reducing waste and stuff like that. It just doesn't fit. Yeah, it's just this one thing. They really love their disposable chopsticks and they just throw them away. They're not being recycled or composted or anything like that.

They're just being thrown in the trash. So some, what I read is that some restaurants will offer tea for free if you bring your own chopsticks or maybe like a discount or something like that. But yeah, basically, but there's not like a lot of, there's not a huge amount of movement in Japan where China, and this is,

I think I read this in like a New York Times green blog or something like that. China's made some moves like taxing disposable, adding an extra tax to disposable chopsticks, I think. More regulation basically overall, I think. Which is really saying something, you know? I mean, there's like apparently a whole sub-industry to the disposable chopsticks industry

that is small enough that it escapes a lot of oversight and they can be really problematic. Like there can be a lot of chemicals in these chopsticks. They're just like an all around basic nightmare and it's just such low hanging fruit. All that everybody has to do is just have their own chopsticks but just people just won't do it. And I'm guilty too, like I said.

I mean, we have reusable ones at home but we don't take them out of the house ever. Yeah, plus the paper used to encase the said chopsticks. That's a lot of paper too. Yeah, it is. And what do you do with that stuff? You just rip it open and burn it at the table. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true.

Should we take another break? Yeah, all right. We'll take another break and talk a little bit about etiquette right after this is we're all doing it wrong to a certain degree. On the podcast, Pay Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, and Joker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We're learning stuff, it's fun with Josh and Chuck. Stuff you should know.

OK, Miss Manners, lay it on. That's Dr. and Mrs. Manners. That's right, Ph.D. Esquire. So this is mainly Japan that we're concentrating on with the etiquette. And like you said, I think they take it a little more seriously than some other Asian countries. Because it turns out that chopsticks can and have

had an important part in burial rites, in funeral rites, Buddhist funeral rites. Like a lot of the taboos, I guess you'd call them, over chopsticks in Japan and in other Asian countries too, are kind of based on like, whoa, that's kind of something we do with funeral rites. So that reminds us of that. Japan is not crazy about being reminded of death,

or mortality, or pain, all that stuff is very unlucky. Like the number four is unlucky. Because the word for four, I think she also sounds very much like the word for death. Right, I think I remember that. So they don't have four elevator floors? Is that right? I don't remember if they do or not.

But let's just go with that they don't. Because it sounds pretty great. So etiquette level one is how this is presented. There's a couple of levels here as far as like, you really shouldn't do these things. But if you really want to ramp it up, you shouldn't do these things as well. I felt these were kind of willy nilly, didn't you?

Well, I mean, this is one person's opinion. Right. But the things that you really shouldn't do are the following. Do not, if you like, get up to go to the bathroom. Don't stick your chopsticks sitting up right in your bowl of rice. No.

And that has to do with the household Buddhist altar, because it is a bowl of rice is offered to a dead person's spirit. And this apparently is from a Buddhist funeral rights as well, because there's a photograph of a bowl of rice. And to stick chopsticks in the middle of that would be verboten. I think it's they'll have like a photograph of the deceased

and they give them a bowl of uncooked rice and they stick the chopsticks up in there. Oh, OK. I read that completely wrong. So it's reminiscent of that. OK. So it's got that death thing going on. The death angle?

Yeah. And then the other thing I saw about that too is that it also is reminiscent of like a bowl of sand with incense sticking out of it that you would also put on a Buddhist shrine to the deceased. So they're like way too reminiscent of death for that to be OK. OK.

That makes sense now. There's another one that's very similar. Don't leave your chopsticks crossed. Right. Like resting on your bowl or on your plate. Just don't cross your chopsticks. It's impolite basically for the exact same reason is sticking them out of the bowl.

Right. And I think that one is one you see like on food, Instagram food posts a lot from Whitey saying, like cross the chopsticks because it looks cool or whatever. Look at how cool this looks. Yeah, not cool apparently. We talked about spearing. The advice here is to treat them as if they are actually

connected even though they're not. It's a good way to remember it. Like pretend connected. That's right. Yeah. And remember this is like that I think that goes back to like Confucius where it's like don't have a knife at your table.

Don't use your chopsticks to spear food. That's right. Apparently it's bad luck or not bad luck. Well, maybe bad luck to use two different chopsticks. Yeah. They should have the same mommy and daddy. This person said that it's just unsightly and that it's also reminiscent of funeral rites.

That one I couldn't figure that one out. Yeah. There's another funeral one too. A lot of funeral rites involve chopsticks. Passing food from chopstick to chopstick. Like if you're like, hey, you got to try a bite of this. That's just hard to do. You hold it up.

But it's a little bit showy if you can do it. Look at us. But when somebody grabs it with their chopstick, that's how they pass bones from cremations during funeral rites too. And they're like, nope, that reminds us of that as well. Yeah. And there are some of these that are just like,

I can't believe people do this. Do not wash your chopsticks off in your beverage. Yeah, that's gross. Does someone do that? I don't know. Apparently somebody has. The other thing about this is so the fact that they have restrictions on this,

social restrictions means that people have done it before. But they also go so far as like, most of these things all have like individual words. That's how agro the Japanese are about this kind of etiquette. They have words for that. Like washing your chopsticks off in your drink is not just called washing your chopsticks off in your drink. Yeah, there's a name for it.

Let me see here. Do not treat them as toys. And we talked earlier about putting them in your mouth like they're fangs or walrus tusks or antennas or drumsticks. Just not a good look. Here's another one that is, this is sort of one that I think happens a lot, is you might see American women maybe do their hair

and put chopsticks in them. When you see that in Japan, those are not chopsticks. It might look like chopsticks, but they're actually called kanzashi. Yeah, it'd be kind of like sticking a fork in your hair. Right. If you're walking around Japan looking like that, they'd be like, why do you have that fork in your hair?

Yeah, it looks a little off. But yeah, they look just like those things, but there is a separate thing. That's right. What did you call them? Kanzashi. Yeah, nice. It's a beautiful word.

I mean, I didn't make that up. Right, I know. Another one is you'll very frequently see people do this. And I've done it too. And it's apparently acceptable under certain circumstances. But when you break your warabashi, your disposable cheap chopsticks apart at the end, if there's splinters or there's like a piece of wood sticking

out, you can rub them together, kind of soften the wood or get the splinters off. But you're not supposed to do that as just like a matter of course, because you're basically insulting the restaurant. You're saying like, these are so cheap, these chopsticks that you're providing your guests, that I've got to rub them together.

And you definitely don't want to like make eye contact with the owner while you're rubbing it together. You're like, this is what I think of your establishment. And people do that all the time. I do it. It's almost like habitual. It's habitual for me. And I started doing it when I first started using chopsticks,

because I saw the person I was with did it. And I was like, I guess that's what you do. You get those little splinters off. And now it's a total habit. And my whole thing there, I don't think that one's a really big one. Especially in America, it happens so much. I don't think anyone, restaurant owners like,

super insulted by seeing this. Sure, yeah, especially in America. But they are super cheap and they do splinter. Right. Well, in that case, yes. Like that proprietor has brought it on himself or herself for providing everybody with such cheap chopsticks that they're splintery.

I will always remember this now. I'll tell you that. Yeah, and this is, so I agree with you. I think that this is probably not that big of an insult, especially in America. It's probably falls in line with how you're not supposed to put your wasabi in the soy sauce or something like that. Well, if you want to just do it, you know?

If you want to be remarkably polite, then you wouldn't do any of these things. Some are way worse than others. And I think that one probably falls into the lesser category, even though it's under this advancing. This is why I was saying this seems willy-nilly. Yeah, and we also covered some of this in our sushi episode. Because if I'm not mistaken,

don't you eat sushi with your fingers? Or am I wrong? Don't you? Don't you eat with your fingers or do you not? No, I don't. I love showing off how great I am at chopsticks. I use them every turn. You got some skills?

Every time I can. Yeah, I eat millet gruel with chopsticks. That's how good I am. Yeah, or you, I've seen you just flip up a shrimp and catch it in the other one. What a show off. It's pretty great. Because you have chopsticks, you have four,

you have two in each hand. Yes, basically. And you do a little sideshow there. It's really impressive. Edward's scissor hands. Josh, chopstick finger. But no, you're supposed to eat sushi, it's specifically nigiri with your hand.

That's how it was originally done. If I remember correctly from our sushi episode. I think so. Yeah, but yeah, we use chopsticks these days. Here's another no-no is do not use chopstick as a rake. Like don't lift up a bowl of rice and just sort of rake rice into your mouth. So that's Japan.

I saw in China that's perfectly accepted. Oh, really? Really normal. Okay, yeah. Yeah, it gets dicey because it's not the same everywhere, you know? Yeah, here's the thing. I don't know if we said this before.

So in Thailand, they don't use chopsticks almost as a rule. In Vietnam, Korea, Japan, China, they're totally ubiquitous, almost the only thing you're gonna find that you eat with. And so that means that like even a bowl of soup, like miso soup, you're supposed to use your chopsticks for that. Like the little chunks of tofu.

Yeah. Took me a second. You use your chopsticks to eat those out of the bowl and then you slurp the rest or sip the rest, depending. But with rice, you would hold the bowl up kind of close to your face, but not like up in your face, just under your chin and out a little bit. And then you eat the rice with your chopsticks from there,

lifting the rice up to your mouth, not shoveling it into your mouth from the bowl. Right. And I saw with soups and things also, is if you really want to ramp up the etiquette, you should try and drip into the bowl. Oh, right. When you like, when you are picking up the tofu,

you want to kind of shake the tofu off so it doesn't drip on you or on the table. Yes. If you really want to excel etiquette, you would just not eat anything. You just sit there quietly with your chopsticks side by side, still in their wrapper, just smiling politely at everyone.

It's like it didn't break any rules and I'm really hungry. That's right. There's a couple of more here. Don't point with your chopsticks. That's tough not to do. Do you point? I don't point at people, you know,

or anything like that. I'll be like, hey, can you pass me that thing right there? Yeah, and you just sort of give a little nod, like, hey, that pot sticker over there. Yeah, because they're fun to hold and point with and like do stuff with. I just, I don't know, maybe I'm still, it's still novel enough to me

that I have to remind myself not to point or you me has to remind me not to point with the chopsticks. Or when you're talking and you're expressing things with your hands and you're using your chopsticks, or if you want to just do a little maestro routine. Right. You know? That's looked down upon.

Or if you're using your hands for something else, you don't stick your chopsticks in your mouth and just hold them in there while you're like moving plates around or something like that, you set them down. And here's the other thing too. If you go to a very nice restaurant in Japan or in the States and it just happens to be a Japanese restaurant, how about that?

Really prolong this thought. They're gonna give you a chopstick rest. Oh, sure. Set your chopsticks on so they're kind of lifted off of the table, the end that you put in your mouth. If you don't have that, you can take that paper wrapper and roll it up and make your own chopstick rest. That's right, because you're setting your chopsticks

down on a table that could be, you know, have germs. Right. And speaking of germs also, Chuck, you never ever use the chopsticks that you're eating with to serve yourself from a communal plate or bowl. That's for sure. They should give you like a spoon or something like that to spoon it onto your plate.

And then you use your chopsticks because that's just germy and disease. And apparently there's like a supplement to that where if they don't give you a serving spoon, people flip their chopsticks over and use the thicker end to shovel the food onto the plate, which is not necessarily any more hygienic because that's where your hands have been

rather than your mouth, but that's the more socially acceptable thing to do than just using the business end of your chopsticks. I don't know why that's so funny to me, but the ends though, I mean, if you're using them right, you're choked up a little bit, so they're not really being touched by your hands, you know?

True. Like you don't stick the ends in your palm. That's right, it's true. You choke up on it like a baseball bat. Yeah, they say in Korea, apparently, that the further down though you hold the chopsticks, the longer it's going to be before you get married. Well, yeah, I mean,

we could talk about some of these kind of fun facts. Fine. Let me see here. One is if you are given an uneven pair, you will miss a boat or a plane. And this came from Malaysia. I'm not sure if that's ubiquitous all over Asia. I think it's Chinese.

Okay. I think. What else here? This is kind of fun. If you use chopsticks, it involves over 50 muscles in the fingers and 30 joints in the, well, overall in the fingers, arms, shoulders, and wrists. Yeah.

Pretty cool. It is. I mean, how many you use for a fork? Like two? Maybe. Give me a break. I saw a couple of things. One is that there was a study that found

that eating popcorn with chopsticks makes eating popcorn much more enjoyable than eating it without chopsticks with your fingers instead. And they even controlled for the amount of extra time it takes to eat popcorn with chopsticks. It's not just that you're eating slower so you're relishing it more

because they had a control group using their fingers eat at a very slow pace too. And apparently they think it's just the fact that you're doing something differently, makes you appreciate the thing that you're doing or that you're eating that much more. Like if you pour water out of like a separate, you know, water bottle, like at a restaurant,

how they have like the little chilled water bottles they'll bring over. Look at your fancy pants. That water would taste better than water that you just poured out of the tap, even if it was the exact same water because it's being conveyed differently. Yeah.

And that's also how you would get popcorn to last through the opening previews of a movie. That's right. Because you're not just shoveling it in your mouth like I do. It's so bizarre, man. I do the same thing. I've tried to do the like a couple of kernels at a time.

Mm-hmm. And you know, I do that for the first few and then before you know it, I've just got handfuls that I'm pushing into my mouth. Right, right. That's how you have to do it. You have to use the palm of your hand to really shove the entire fistful in there.

You can't just use your little fingertips. It doesn't work. You'll choke on them. And I don't know if it's a sort of a subliminal desire for me not to be distracted during the movie. But the ideal, in the ideal world, I would just sit there and munch a couple

of pieces at a time for two hours. Like just chew them a million times? No, no, no. Just eat a couple of kernels at a time and just really elongate the whole experience. Put those chopsticks in your mercs and take those to the theater. People would be like, look at that guy.

Hey, though, you have to be careful, though. Yes, they would. You have to be careful, though, who you brandish those chopsticks around because, so you put this together, kudos for that. One of the facts you came up with is that there's something called leophobia, I think I said,

which is literally a fear of chopsticks. Yeah, there's a fear for everything. But yes, but I was reading a blog post on it on some maybe psychnet, I think. And they were saying like, there's basically two categories of phobias, ones that are semi-rational. They use the example of a fear of sharks.

Well, if you did run into a shark, there's a chance you could be killed by that shark. So it's not just totally bonkers to be afraid of sharks, but the phobia of sharks is in a rational fear. Like maybe if you live in Kansas, you got no reason to have a fear of sharks. This one, they said, this basically qualifies in the bonkers category.

Like there's virtually nothing that chopsticks can do to hurt you. So to be irrationally afraid of chopsticks to where you feel like heart pounding anxiety is a genuine dive in the wolf phobia. But some people do apparently experience this although it's super rare. Yeah, that's interesting.

But you'll like avoid entire types of restaurants because you can't be around chopsticks. And you'll get anxious just thinking about being around chopsticks. That's so sad because Asian food makes up a large portion of my diet. Well, luckily for you, you don't have consecutive leophobia.

No, I mean, when I think about sushi, I think about pha. Right. I think about ramen. I think about good old fashioned Szechuan Chinese food. Oh yeah. Think about Korean. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

I could eat that all the time. Dude, you've got to get some budae jiggae. I'll take you to go get some. You're gonna love it so good. I can't wait. You got anything else? I got nothing else. 45 minutes on chopsticks, baby.

Not bad. If you want to know more about chopsticks, go get yourself some that you can reuse and eat conscientiously with them. And don't forget all the manners, but just go eat some Asian food because no matter where it's from or what it is, it's probably pretty good.

Agreed. Since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm gonna call this Two for Two. Hey guys, I wrote a few years ago about Alan Alda and thought I'd share a Sammy Davis Jr. story. Oh wow. And this is from Andrew Limburg in Pittsburgh. And he got his Alan Alda one read.

And when I told him this was coming on, he wrote back Two for Two, baby. Nice. There's people out there who are like 0 for 10. I know. I'm so sorry. I assume. It's not like we're keeping track of people like that.

Oh no, I have a spreadsheet. Turn the screws on. Oh, you do? Yeah. Oh man, that's me. He says, so in the 80s, Sammy had been cleaned out by his ex-wife and was selling barbecue sauce. He was in Pittsburgh to promote it.

And my friend Larry, who had a local TV show at the time, got a chance to interview him. When they arrived at the hotel, they were told they would get 20 minutes with Sammy. But when they talked to Sammy's manager, he said only 10 minutes. So instead of having time to set up a two-shot interview and for people that don't know the lingo,

that means both people are in the same camera frame. Okay. They kept the camera on Sammy and Larry would then go back and add his footage later. So he would, I guess, re-ask the questions with a ghost Sammy just to edit it together. At the end of the interview, they needed one, just one two-shot

of the two of them together so they could edit it realistically. And Sammy's manager said, nope. And Larry looked at Sammy almost begging because they needed the two-shot. Sammy took a long drag of a cigarette and said, get your two-shot, babe. The manager then said, oh, well, I guess I'm the A-hole

to which Sammy said, as a matter of fact, babe, you are an A-hole. So this is how the story goes, apparently. And then Andrew says he's been listening since 08 and went to that live show in Pittsburgh. Please come back. Yeah. And he says he has a podcast now

called the Pittsburgh Oddcast. Nice. And he said we average about 1,500 listens an episode, which is pretty darn good, Andrew. Yeah, it is nice work, Andrew. For a self-styled show, that's not bad at all. Especially a local one too, Pittsburgh Oddcast. Yeah, so Pittsburghians, if you're from the Berg,

check out the Pittsburgh Oddcast in Andrew. Or even if you're interested in it. Sure. In Pittsburgh. Philadelphia, and just be a Berg head. Exactly. Well, that was a pretty great one. Thank you very much, two for two.

That's pretty impressive, Andrew. And if you want to get Chuck to do any Sammy Davis Jr. impressions, write in with your own Sammy Davis Jr. story and see how it goes. And you can put that in an email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.