Emigrating has generally been a very, very complicated and difficult task, but by far the hardest aspect has been relearning how to use a knife and fork.
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I thought everyone knew this but ....
Neurodivergent story time!In the era of French aristocracy, American culture was just starting to get posh. And Americans (colonists then citizens) at the time decided great high class table manners meant copying high French fashion. So they adopted this weird "zig zag" method of eating where we only eat with the fork in our right hands facing up like you'd scoop food, but also only use the knife in our right hands. So every time you cut something you set the fork down and switch hands, then switch back. We can't eat with a fork in our left hand (if we were raised with strict table manners that don't care about handedness).
America did that big revolution and our big freedom thing and never switched back. The rest of the world moved on to knife in the right hand, fork in the left turned downward whilst cutting stuff.
You can always tell an American while eating by how we use the knife and fork. It's how they caught spies in WWII. Turns out it is incredibly hard to relearn XD
@hacks4pancakes It's also how you can tell when an American actor is playing an Englishman
while Downey does cut his food with the knife in his right hand in this clip, it would be unusual in the extreme to see a non-American adult put their food in their mouth with this weird fork grip
https://youtu.be/388-rOzD9SM?si=o_q051bexJXzCJtS&t=239 Americans appear to be far more likely than most other people to hold their fork vertically, like a microphone they're about to sing into, when putting food in their mouth.