Man is a Dining Animal
A (very) short history of the fork
How did the fork become so central to “proper” table manners in the UK and beyond? Inspired by Lara Mohammed’s reflections on the presumed “civility” of eating with a fork, this piece traces the utensil’s surprising journey from Middle Eastern courts to British dining tables — and how it always carried meanings far beyond the act of eating.
By Zoë Johnson for our BODY issue
I drafted this brief history of forks while editing Lara Mohammed’s beautiful piece on eating with her hands. Growing up as a second-generation British-Iraqi woman, Lara was taught that forks were essential to “proper” table manners, only to realize later that this conflicted with the eating traditions of her Iraqi heritage. Her piece, which traces the shame she felt around eating with her hands back to colonial ideas of civility, sent me down a rabbit hole: When and why did people in the UK start using forks? And how did this utensil become so entangled with ideas of superiority, refinement, and colonial control?
As it turns out, the link between cutlery and “polite” eating is relatively recent and, as frequent FFJ readers might expect, deeply political. What we now think of as table manners in many Western countries evolved to discipline bodies, especially those of women, the poor, and the colonized. In the context of our BODY issue, the fork’s journey is a reminder that eating has always been a bodily act shaped by social power that dictates whose hands are allowed at the table, and how they’re expected to move.
The earliest forks were two-pronged, used as tools for cooking rather than moving food from plate to mouth, but they made their first appearance as table implements in the noble courts of the Middle East and the Byzantine Empire in about the 7th century. By the 10th century, they had become common among the upper, monied classes in the region.
When Maria Argyropoulina, the niece of Byzantine Emperor Basil II, married Giovanni, son of Pietro Orseolo II, the Doge of Venice in 1004, she brought with her a set of gold forks, insisting that they be used at her wedding feast. This behaviour was decried by local clergy for its decadence.
"God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks — his fingers," one reportedly said. "Therefore, it is an insult to him to substitute artificial metal forks for them when eating.”
Like many women who came before her — and after — Argyropoulina’s manners were the subject of intense public scrutiny and understood as a reflection of her lack of morality and social worth. Argyropoulina died of the plague a few years later. Many years after that, an Italian monk, Saint Peter Damian, allegedly suggested that her death was God’s revenge after she so insulted him by eating with a fork.1
Despite this moral condemnation, the practice of eating with forks persisted quietly in parts of the Mediterranean. By the 1400s, members of Italy’s upper class were increasingly using forks at mealtimes. This may have been in part due to the influence of Arab and Byzantine traditions that continued to shape courtly life, aesthetics, and cuisine. The Renaissance also brought a renewed interest in bodily refinement and classical elegance, and forks became associated with ideals of grace and order.
They then spread France through another royal marriage, this time between Catherine de Medici and Henry II in 1533. Popular lore attributes Catherine with bringing not just forks but a whole host of Italian table manners, culinary techniques, and aesthetic sensibilities to the French court. The earliest known mention of Catherine de Medici as the source of Italy’s culinary sway in France appears in the 1754 Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. The entry on “cuisine” casts haute cuisine as indulgent and effeminate, attributing its arrival to a wave of Italian courtiers who, it claims, brought their elaborate sauces and extravagant cooking styles to Catherine’s table — and, by extension, to France. While food historians have debunked this as a myth, the endurance of the story itself is revealing. Whether or not Catherine actually transformed French dining, the fact that she was blamed for its perceived decadence reflects a familiar pattern: women at court were often cast as the agents of cultural change, and simultaneously held responsible for its supposed excesses.
From France, the fork’s path to Britain was more winding. An English traveller, Thomas Coryat, brought a fork back from Italy in 1608 and began using it publicly, defending it in his travelogue Coryat’s Crudities as a cleaner, more refined way to eat. Coryat’s fork use was ridiculed by many back home, who saw eating with such an implement as a “feminine affectation” of the Italians, and not fitting with the hyper-masculinity that has defined British (food) culture for centuries. In her essay in Feeding Desire on the sexual politics of cutlery, Carolin Young traces Briton’s perception of forks as having an “unsettlingly effeminate aura” through to 1897 when British sailors were still writing them off as unmanly.
By the Victorian era, forks had trickled down to the tables of Britain’s growing bourgeoisie, and the etiquette around dining had become of paramount importance to all of those seeking upward mobility within the rigid social hierarchy of the time. As such, table manners were also used as a tool of social exclusion or evidence of the superiority of the upper (white) classes. As Isabella Beeton explains in the famous 1861 book Mrs Beeton’s Book on Household Management:
“Man, it has been said, is a dining animal. Creatures of the inferior races eat and drink; man only dines.”
This was not just a quip but a claim to civility, empire, and control — the fork, in this framing, stood as a badge of belonging to the “dining” class of empire-builders.
More than 150 years later, the fork, as Lara describes in her recent FFJ essay, is still wielding power over people. I saw this most clearly while studying at Oxford, attending formal dinners in the grand halls of the University’s famed colleges. Seated at long tables beneath vaulted ceilings echoing with Latin graces, surrounded by portraits of long-dead white men, each place setting was guarded by multiple forks — fish fork, entrée fork, dessert fork. It was impossible not to feel that these tiny gates were there to guard class divisions, to make those who belong feel superior, and those who don’t, uneasy. Lara’s piece reminded me that these feelings aren’t incidental; they’re the point. Forks, after all, have always been about more than eating. They are tools of social choreography, used to signal civility, superiority, and control. And yet, their history also reminds us how constructed those signals are — and how, by understanding this, we can choose to challenge and rewrite the rules of the table in ways that honour all bodies and cultures.
Zoë Johnson is a founding editor and illustrator of Feminist Food Journal. She also works as the communications manager at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin.
Editor’s note: It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a year since our pitch window for BODY closed and we read the first seeds of the thoughtful, surprising stories that have bloomed throughout this issue. While BODY will soon begin to wind down, we’re not quite there yet — there’s still more to come! But in case you need to catch up, here’s the full list of what we’ve published so far:
Bottomless: A journey through grief, gas, and gut instincts by Shena Cavelo
Questioning Lumps: Encountering obstacles in a smoothening world by Clare Michaud
Esophageal Yearning: this sounds violent / but it’s fun by Taylor Hunsberger
Where Does All the Food Go? On body size and Nigerian beauty standards by Rejoice Isaac
Pregnancy in the Time of Health Abundance: On pregnancy fitness influencers, algorithms, and breast-is-best pressure by Sarah Duignan
Bite Me: Cosmetic cannibalism and selling identity through scent by Lily Wakeley
Milking Bodies to Make A Nation: Women and cows as founding mothers by Apoorva Sripathi (from MILK)
Be the Boar: Sex, sows, and courtship on a Danish pig farm by Katy Overstreet (from SEX)
Soy Boy: How soy milk went from proto superfood to alt-right rallying cry by Julia Norza (from MILK)
To Eat is To Perform: Reclaiming eating practices, one handful at a time by Lara Mohammed
Sugar on My Tongue: How flavoured orgasms taught me I don’t need permission to feel good by Guilia Alvarez-Katz
And if you like something you’ve read… please do share it with a friend!
Given that Saint Peter Damian is believed to have told this story about forks decades after Argyropoulina’s death (he was only born around 1007), it is also possible he could have been referring to Theodora Doukas, daughter of Constantine X Doukas, who married the Doge of Venice, Domenico Selvo. Regardless, as Maria Parani writes in her history of Byzantine cutlery, Damian’s account reflects “the negative attitude of Western ecclesiastics towards the table-fork, which was regarded for centuries to come as decadent, effeminate, and an instrument of the devil.”
Such an insightful read - the feminisation of the fork is so interesting to think about!
Loved this well told brief history of the fork. Who knew? There are fascinating stories in everything and they are always political. Thanks for telling this one and thanks for all of ffj.