A retired couple have been using the same set of cutlery for 50 years – meaning it has been used 51,918 times. Fred and Val O’Hanlon got the 56-piece set the year they were married in 1964 and not a single spoon or knife has gone missing.

Grandmother Val, 73, said: “It has seen 50 years of constant use, through the trials of family life.”  The couple, who celebrated their Golden Wedding in June at Hedge End, near Southampton, got the set after Val’s mum Marjory collected tokens from boxes of Kellogg’s All-Bran, for two years.  Fred, 74, added: “All I can say is it’s a good job Marjory loved All-Bran so much. I never expected we would still have the set 50 years down the line. It has lasted as long as our marriage.”

Val’s mum Marjory collected tokens from boxes of Kellogg’s All Bran, over the course of two years eating 730 bowls of her favorite cereal. Her dedication to collecting the vouchers meant Val, who lived with her, could send them off and trade them in for the cutlery. When the pair got engaged in 1962 Kellogg’s were running the offer, which meant customers could receive a seven-piece cutlery set for collecting five boxes of All Bran. Each set of the stainless steel cutlery includes a dinner knife and fork, dessert knife, fork and spoon and a soup spoon and teaspoon. They’ve lasted as long as our marriage, they are the oldest things we own.”

Val, 73, said: “In all this time we have never lost any of the cutlery, we haven’t even lost a teaspoon. We don’t polish them, we just keep them like any other cutlery.”

When Val wrote to Kellogg’s to tell them about their cutlery set, the company were so impressed they sent them each a special customized spoon with their names engraved on them to mark their 50th wedding anniversary.

I’m left handed and in part that is the reason I eat with my cutlery in “European Style” or “Continental Style” as in the image above. I find it a much more efficient and precise manner for using for flatware.

According to the Wikipedia entry on Eating Utensil Etiquette:

“When used in conjunction with a knife to cut and consume food in Western social settings, two forms of fork etiquette are common. In the European style, the diner keeps the fork in his or her left hand, while in the American style the fork is shifted between the left and right hands. The American style is most common in the United States. But the European style is considered proper in other countries.

Originally, the traditional European method, once the fork was adopted as a utensil, was to transfer the fork to the right hand after cutting food, as it had been considered proper for all utensils to be used with the right hand only. This tradition was brought to America by British colonists and is still in use in the United States. Europe adopted the more rapid style of eating in relatively modern times.”

The reasons for the cultural difference has always alluded me. This article at AZ Central has many different theories about how this came to be.

 

“Brookie ” created by John Sendelbach is a 10-foot-long sculpture made of spoons, forks, knives and other stainless-steel cutlery that is located in Greenfield, Massachusetts.  We like to see the recycled use of flatware into art on this blog.

Read about it at The Recorder