Knives get the chop at the dinner table

HOLDING your knife in your right hand and your fork in the left has long been an essential dining table rule of polite society.

But increasingly, it seems, the younger generation are rejecting the etiquette of their elders.

Instead, a survey has found, many under-30s prefer to eat one-handed with a fork, while one in five adopt the American ‘cut and switch’ technique, putting the knife down and moving the fork from left to right hand in order to transfer food to mouth. And while older people are unlikely to change their long-ingrained table manners, the findings suggest a new etiquette may become the norm for future generations.

This is news that Sam Taylor, editor of The Lady magazine, finds hard to swallow.

‘The young are quite lazy, particularly in the way they go through meals with their head bowed over their telephones,’ she said. ‘The reason they are using one hand and the switch method is that they are using their other hand to work their mobile.

‘They are rather bad dinner guests. It shows they didn’t eat with their parents very much. If they had, they would have been rapped over the knuckles for not holding their cutlery correctly.’

A spokesman for internet search engine Ask Jeeves, which carried out the survey, said: ‘Dinner time in British households has changed significantly. Many families no longer eat together around the table so have not grown up with rules about what they should and shouldn’t do.’

The figures suggest that traditional table manners are disappearing fastest in Wales but remain most prevalent in South-West England, where 94 per cent of those surveyed still stick to the time-honoured rules.