Turn your fingers into chopsticks
Zou Hanru China Daily  Updated: 2005-10-21 05:51

Hand-to-mouth existence. The hand that feeds the mouth. These are common phrases even in today's IT-driven world. Bring in a medium between the hand and the mouth and a phrase, more often than not, takes a negative twist.

Think spoon-feeding or born with a silver spoon in the mouth. So why do we use a medium between two of the most important parts of our body? Do we still have to prove our evolution (or elevation) from a natural animal to a social animal?

The Greeks were perhaps the first to use (two-tine) forks. Man may have begun using spoons earlier, thanks to oyster, clam and mussel shells. But even before the Greeks (and later the Romans) were mastering the use of forks, a cutlery revolution was taking place in China. About 5,000 years ago, it must be that hasty eaters started breaking twigs off trees to retrieve food cooked in large pots to retain the heat as long as possible. These twigs were the first chopsticks.

In due time, chopsticks spread to Korea, Japan and Viet Nam, becoming the staple utensils in East Asia. In the agriculture-based East Asia's early civilizations, chopsticks, made of wood and bamboo (and bone, ivory and silver, too), were a "natural" agrarian reality.

But times have changed. Today, we no longer have abundant forest cover, our land is no longer that green, our water tables are depleting and our numbers are expanding faster than ever. Despite all this and the availability of modern industrial substitutes such as steel and plastic, our fondness for traditional chopsticks has not changed.

The result: Our hunger for chopsticks continues to eat into our forests.

The question now is do we continue using chopsticks?

Before answering that question, let us delve into some bare facts.

Today, disposable chopsticks, rather than traditional ones, are a real threat to the environment. China is the world's largest disposable-chopstick maker, with over 300 plants that employ about 60,000 workers.

The country has been exporting 140,000 to 165,000 tons of use-and-throw chopsticks since 2000, with 15 billion pairs ending up on Japanese and South Korean dinner tables alone. These chopsticks not only denude forests, but also create a huge mass of garbage.

On the contrary, look at Japan. Though 69 per cent of its land mass is still covered by forests, it does not make disposable chopsticks. All the 25 billion pairs it uses are imported and then recycled after use. Japan's environment consciousness is in stark contrast to that of China that has nearly 1.3 billion people but only 13 per cent forest cover. Yet, we continue to chop down millions of trees every year in return for foreign exchange.

China itself uses 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks a year, or 1.66 million cubic metres of timber, or 25 million full-grown trees. That translates into an annual loss of about 2 million square metres of wooded land.

We are losing our forest resources at an alarming rate to a rapidly growing economy. The more affluent the people get, the more the demand for bigger homes and a wide range of furniture. Newspapers get thicker in their bid to grab a bigger share of the advertising market. These are but only two examples of what makes us cut down more trees.

The benefits of forests are well-known, and need not be repeated here. But what needs to be said over and over again is that only a resource-friendly approach can sustain our growing economy.

We cannot make people replace their wooden furniture with steel ones and switch to electronic newspapers totally. But we can have a law to make people pay for using disposable chopsticks. Let the free distribution of disposable chopsticks stop. And let part of their sales proceeds be harnessed for afforestation and for the upkeep of our existing forests.

Or, we can switch permanently to steel, aluminium or fibre chopsticks.

Or, better still, we can use our hands, like some parts of Asia, to satiate our hunger, or to savour delicacies. Ask any Indian, Pakistani or Arab what the best way is to eat. Nothing that man has made, he will tell you, can rival the five fingers of the hand.

Let us respect Nature for what it has given us. And can there be a better way of doing that than using our hand to eat?

After all, aren't the hand and mouth made for each other?

Email: zouhr@chinadaily.com.hk

(China Daily 10/21/2005 page4)