It’s getting harder and harder to tell the spoons apart.
We go through a lot of spoons in our house. For one thing, they’re very useful things – you can substitute them for pretty much any other utensil if you work hard enough, but the reverse is not true (ever tried to eat soup with a fork? It’s … tedious). And for another, they tend to commit suicide by garbage disposal more often than you’d think. The life of a spoon must be hard indeed.
So we keep buying new spoons. New soup spoons. New teaspoons. But the old ones hang around too, because they are useful still. It’s not like they get stale or anything. Bottom line: there is quite an assortment of spoons in our drawer.
It is my job to keep them in their proper slots.
I’m the dishwasher in our house. When Kim and I got married, that was the division of chores we made – she did laundry, I did dishes. It has worked out quite well, in a “not-having-pink-socks” kind of way. But the bottom line is that when the spoons come out of the dishwasher, it is my task to put them back into the tableware drawer in the right places.
But this is becoming increasingly difficult to do, as there seems to have been rather a creep in the size of spoons in recent years.
The teaspoons that we recently purchased on our last daytrip to IKEA (yes, we do that for fun – IKEA is to Kim what bookstores are to me) are nearly as big as the soup spoons that I had before we got married. The soup spoons we recently purchased are almost the size of serving utensils. The serving utensils are the size of gardening implements. Meanwhile the old teaspoons look like new honey dippers, and at the current rate of depreciation they will soon look like dented butter knives.
What is the purpose of this?
Have our mouths gotten bigger? I suppose it’s possible – most things about Americans have gotten bigger in the last few decades, with the possible exception of our political morals. Undertakers had to upgrade the size of caskets a few years back, so I suppose it might make sense that we’d need bigger spoons.
I’m not sure this constitutes progress.
SPOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON!
you can substitute them for pretty much any other utensil if you work hard enough
ReplyDeleteI realize you added that little qualifier, but when you carve a roast using a spoon to hold it in place, I want video of it. Oh, and please use one of those little mustard sppons, m'kay?
Plus spoons make for an excellent battle cry.
ReplyDeleteSPOOOOOOON!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcm-J7lQT3w
Way back when, husband and I bought a set of very nice stainless steel Swedish tableware (good word . . . it feels funny calling the stainless the silverware). A teaspoon went missing years ago and I recently went online to one of those replacement places to see whether I could get one. I could get any other piece except for teaspoons for some reasonable price, but a teaspoon was in the range of three digits. I'm sure that indicates that teaspoons disappear at the greatest rate, but where are they all going? Perhaps these replacement places rifle through our drawers stealing spoons to sell them back to us at exorbitant prices.
ReplyDeleteNathan - think "grapefruit spoon."
ReplyDeleteMatt - The Tick rules.
Lee - try IKEA. They have a nice selection of actual Swedish tableware, even if the pieces are expanding in size. But you're right - the teaspoons are always the most expensive. You'd think there would be some economy of scale somehow.