The Chork: If Chopsticks and Forks Had a Baby

iPads are great but can you use them to put a piece of steak in your mouth? With all our technological advances, food-to-mouth progress has been severely lacking until now.

Video: More chopstick innovations

Enter the Chork: part fork, part chopsticks, all business.

The newly invented disposable utensil, (only $6 for a 24 pack!), is a direct result of America's food fusion. Look down at your salad bar lunch: that's Lo Mein you decided to rest on a bed of Caesar salad. And how did a pesto tortellini end up on that piece of Sushi? And most importantly, which do you use to put it all in the pie-hole: chopsticks or a fork?

Listen closely: The Chork, Danielson. Use the chopsticks for noodles, and the fork for swooping up chucks of anchovy-doused croutons. (The taste overlap may still be questionable but that's a problem for salad bar container makers to tackle).

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The Chork also politely excuses extreme left-handers like myself, taunted by noodles slipping through our mis-gripped chopsticks, when they're but a centimeter from our mouths. Damn you chopsticks!

The Chork says, "that's okay, flip me over and use the fork!." It also provides a subtle "training" option for kids or me-types. While the utensil severs to go from fork to full-on double chopstick. You can also flip the forkside up and use the chopsticks as fused "trainer" sticks.

Nick Van Dyken and Jordan Brown, the guys behind the Chork, came up with the idea, appropriately over dinner. "One night we went out for sushi and, while both of us are decent with chopsticks, we still needed a fork to pick up the rice and smaller items on the plate," Van Dyken tells Shine. " While alternating between chopsticks and a fork, the idea for the Chork was born."

So far, the product is getting raves from unexpected critics. "It covers every base, every age, every food, every skill level," writes Gizmodo tech-blogger Casey Chan, a self-described enemy of the spoon. Chan believes the Chork "would be the first utensil that we should invent if we were to go back in time."

I hope that's not what we said about the spork.

More utensil talk:
Crazy ways to use chopsticks
Dirty dinner forks
The first time I used a spork...