Soup drips through and you stab yourself: the spork is the worst utensil

[Diane “Piper” Soini]

Not mentioned is that sporks do not allow you to scrape the insides of your pot. And long handled spoons are too long to fit inside your pot. The short-handled titanium spoon is the best spoon, but I keep losing them. I recently bought a folding titanium spoon. It nests underneath an 8oz fuel canister or along the side of a 4oz canister inside my 700ml Toaks Light pot. It is not as nice to eat with as the MSR plastic folding spoon that I everyday-carry for consuming the foam on my cappuccino.

[jscott]

Spoon plus slurp equals yum. the broth cools as you eat the solid contents with a spoon, and then sip as the liquid part cools. One has to learn to adjust to the tool!! we can’t demand the tool adjust to us. It’s a give and take, as the song says. You can’t hurry soup, no you just have to wait.

As for scraping…if necessary I use a bit of river sand. Anything that goes into my pot is brought to a boil. The contents are disinfected. and no, I don’t boil long dead animals found on the trail.

[David Thomas]

When I did the Wilderness Survival Merit Badge class at summer camp in the 1970s, one of the requirements was to “carve a utensil” which implied a fork or spoon but didn’t specify.  There were multiple scouts from an SF Chinatown troop and they all snapped off two sticks and called them chopsticks.  They were competent enough with them that the camp counselor had to sign off on them.

As I posted many years ago, a bamboo spoon is longer, stronger, lighter and vastly cheaper than plastic or titanium versions.  And if used as firewood on your last night, is a consumable and doesn’t count against your base weight.

Like HX pots, at some group size, the weight of a small spatula scraper is justified by the reduced weight if you get 99.8% of the calories from the pots and bowls and minimize clean-up.

[Adam]

That’s a slippery slope David. We can all claim our baseweight as zero if we set it all alight before we make it to the very end of the trip. Could you imagine the piles of melted synthetics smeared all over the ground just short of the Canadian border? Zero-baseweight PCT Thru-hike complete…

[David Thomas]

Adam, but if you self arrest on that slippery slope, is there a sweet spot?

Instead of putting my Day 1 tortilla warps in a zip lock or aluminum foil, why not waxed paper?  Then put the used wax paper under the next bit of used toilet paper (in mineral soil and low fire danger) to more completely burn it all up.

There’s the home/school craft project in fall in which you preserve colorful leaves by ironing them inside of two layers of wax paper.  Would that be a viable repackaging for instant mashed potatoes, hot chocolate, and FD meals so you’d pack out less garbage?

Take-out-food chopsticks as tent pegs?

But I think carrying wax candles instead of an LED light might be going too far.

Meat rabbits as pack animals?  Llama burgers for very large groups?  Amundsen purportedly said that he succeeded in returning from the South Pole with sled dogs while Scott’s entire team died using ponies and motors because “Dogs can eat dogs.”

[Megan W]

You could self-arrest on that slippery slope with a spork.

[Geoff Caplan]

On the same theme, you could dig a snow hole or dig out an avalanche victim.

It truly is a multi-use tool!

[Adam]

Could self-arrest with the spoon too. Or the chopsticks…

[Jerry Adams]

I’m going to have to quit burning my tent and sleeping bag after my last night to reduce base weight : )

[Patrick Martin]

“I’m An OuTdOoR sNoB, i UsE cUtLeRy”…

Pah, from hand to mouth, everything else is lexanry! And I usually need both hands to wrestle down my sustenance anyway. 👹 Sporks are for d…. – ..dualusers! dividuals? duelists!

I can’t remember if I’ve ever posted anything on the forums. But now – “The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things” – finally a worthy topic!

Anyhow, Grüezi y’all!

[Megan W]

To pilfer from another topic…

I want a Like (or Laugh) button for THIS thread.

Hello Patrick- that’s a wonderful first-ever-post

[Jerry Adams]

The time has come, the walrus said…

Thank goodness for the Google so I can figure things out

I didn’t know that “I am the walrus” in the Beatles song was based on this…

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