Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Stick A Fork In It

My mom used to tell me it was a sin if I didn't clean my plate.

Turns out, the Catholic church used to tell people it was a sin if they used a fork to clean their plate. From CBS Sunday Morning:
CBS -- Since they were first used, utensils have evolved a great deal. The spoon came first, then the knife and the fork as we know it today, existed mainly for spearing things It wasn't widely used as an eating utensil until the 16th century, partly thanks to the devil.

"It reminded people of the devil's horns," Darra Goldstein, the co-curator of "Feeding Desire," an exhibition of tableware at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, told Sunday Morning correspondent Martha Teichner. "Even apart from the association with the devil, the idea was that God gave us hands and God gives us food, and we as humans should take that food that was given by God with our god-given hands and convey it to our mouths, and so there was tremendous resistance by the Catholic church to the introduction of the fork."
Full story here.

It pleases me that the church no longer thinks using a fork is the devil's work.

It also pleases me that the church no longer disputes Galileo's belief in a heliocentric universe, and that's he's no longer considered one who blasphemed.

Two things:
* I wonder what Galileo would have thought about stem cell research.

* I wonder what Galileo would have thought about forks.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Joe, Did you read about the nun who was Sainted from the US just recently. She was excommunicated and had big run ins with the Bishop. I wonder where that will lead St. Stanislaus and Grzegorz Koltuniak