When Brooke Black and her Danish husband first lived together in the United States, she doesn’t recall their different dining habits ever really being a thing.
It wasn’t until the 44-year-old mother of two moved to Denmark in 2020 that she became acutely aware that she didn’t use eating utensils like her husband — or pretty much any of the Europeans around her.
Growing up in Illinois, Black says her mother only set their family dinner table with forks, unless there was something being served, such as steak, that warranted a knife to cut it.
“I have not used a knife my whole life,” says Black, who shares cultural commentary about her daily life in Denmark on her Instagram account. While she jokes that she “stands by that a fork can also be a knife,” she never learned to eat in the “zigzagging” manner of many Americans who will cut meat with the knife in their dominant hand before switching the fork back into that one to eat.
But in Denmark at family gatherings, with her fork held in her right hand from the get-go — tines up — and her knife largely untouched beside the plate, Black soon realized she stuck out.
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