… The knife, in contrast, is pretty much the epitome of change. The first knives were made of stone, a shard of granite, quartz, flint, and those who lived in a volcanic area made knives from lava glass. Such knives were razor sharp, and they were fragile. What the ancestors sought and invented was a knife made of metal, of bronze, iron, and finally steel. Carbon steel, stainless steel, and from there to titanium and the ultimate today, molybdenum-vanadium. Thin knives, large knives, flat, convex, tapered, one-sided, two-sided, with or without forked teeth attached.
A knife had to be able to dissect food ingredients, remove the skin from an animal, cut muscles and tendons. It had to be able to peel, deseed, debone, slice, ever finer, ever thinner. The sharper the knife, the healthier, better and more appetizing the meal. Ten thousand years of optimism history is first and foremost the story of ten thousand years of knives, of cooks and chefs who, with tireless optimism and unrelenting success, continued to search for ever better and ever more efficient food, for the benefit of ever healthier people in an ever more productive society.
But it is also a story that inevitably cuts both ways. For a knife that can feed can also cause tobleed. In the blink of an eye it may turn into a stabbing, slitting and slashing device. The last place you want to see that happen is in the bosom of the family, at the table where everyone gathers for the shared act of survival: the meal, eating, the collective rite of refueling the body. And therefore ten thousand years ago our forebears invented table manners, an etiquette that refined itself over time and produced a second incarnation of the original, the table knife.
Nothing symbolizes the clash between optimism and pessimism as acutely as the kitchen knife and the table knife. The desire to make one ever sharper and the other ever blunter flowed in both cases from a deep-rooted will to live healthier, longer and more comfortably. In a chef's hand, the knife can never be sharp enough. In the hand of a table companion, it must be harmless. Because cutting into ingredients is one thing, but cutting into a fellow diner is taboo. That's why the Chinese and Japanese use chopsticks.
Hence table manners. Rules of the game, agreements, compromises. Laws were originally table manners. They reflect a widely held optimism that, as long as we manage to control our demons, every dream can eventually be turned into a fact. And they work, on large and tiny scales, every day. Laws underpin our blind faith in what's inside the milk jar at the supermarket, in the pharmacy's pills, and in the functioning of traffic lights.
In all cultures, legislation is the ultimate result of what were originally rules of conduct at the dinner table, man-made agreements about the quicksand between feeding and protecting. Rules governing table knives that became increasingly blunt, that had to surrender one of their cutting edges, that lost their sharp tip and replaced it with something semicircular or oval. They were placed next to the plate with the sharp edge facing inward. Over time they no longer lasted a whole meal, bread was broken and not cut, cheese got its own innocent knife, and so did fruit, which was best pared with acidity-resistant silver.
The only reason why finally, at a relatively late stage, in Venice during the eleventh century, the fork was invented to join the knife, was that the rules no longer approved of knife tips lifting a bite of food to the mouth. Also, not everyone enjoyed watching how at the head of the table the meat was being held down by unclean fingers while the carving knife divided the servings. Hooray to the fork, as long as it sits next to the plate with the curved side up and the teeth down when not in use.
Every sword, lance, dagger, harpoon, bayonet, every bullet, torpedo and missile that pierces an enemy target is a derivative of the knife. Our ancestors had it figured out early on: if we are to have a future, we must all agree on seriously abiding to certain regulations. Reasonable people may differ among themselves as to how well or badly this has been applied over the centuries, but the facts speak for themselves.
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History is written by optimists & so is the future