No, Ug, use the spoon not your fingers!
If you’ve ever been a parent you will know the pure joy of trying to get your children to use a knife and fork. It’s a learning curve that seems to be beyond many of us, even into to adulthood, and this is especially interesting when you consider that if it were not for our ability to use cutlery we may have never evolved from living in the trees. You can now get cutlery far beyond that of the stone type and a good place to start looking for Restaurant Cutlery is https://www.heritagesilverware.com/category/restaurant-cutlery. Restaurant cutlery is amongst some of the finest around. But what did our ancestors use and why?
It might not come as much of a surprise to find that a simple stone knife was the first implement used. What is surprising is that just the fact that our ancestor thought to use the knife to slice up meat and cut up vegetables, rather than eating them whole or gnawing it straight off the bone, set them on a path of enlightenment that would see them stop being a massively jawed, small brain big faced ape type creature into the intelligent beings we are today (although this is debateable).
With our food now nicely sliced, diced or mashed by a rock (an early potato masher) we no longer needed the sizeable jaw and big teeth. This allowed our faces to shrink and the brain to grow from the enzymes in the meat. It also meant we could try this speech idea out. Forget about cooking the food as being the main reason we evolved as was previously thought, it was this simple act that made the difference. Cooking comes much later, some think about five hundred thousand years later so we certainly took small steps to advance.
It all comes down to chewing. Smaller bits of food make it easier to eat and digest. This was true of meat in particular which is chewy at the best of times. As their brains grew they needed more nutrients and the action of chewing combined with the natural temperature of the mouth meant that they got the full benefit of the food they ate to make the brain grow. Perhaps this might give your little ones some incentive to us their knife and fork, anything is worth a try.