Things I bought in Japan: wooden spoons for eating.

I have large wooden cooking spoons and forks and spatulas, and even larger wooden serving spoons. Plenty of wooden butter knives, even a wooden cake slice. For years already I’ve wished for a good wooden eating spoon, but never found one. I’ve run across crafts stalls selling spoons of roughly the right size, but they’ve all had a shape that’s more decorative than useful. A good eating spoon fits the shape of the human mouth. And is made of a suitable material! A spatula can be rough and scratchy, but an eating spoon needs to be as smooth as silk.

Why a wooden spoon? Because wood is soft and warm, where metal is hard and cold. I mostly don’t mind forks, but metal spoons sometimes truly feel like lumps in my mouth, and I wish there was something better.

One of the shops in the cookware district in Tokyo must have been run by someone like me. They had dozens of varieties of wooden spoons, in all kinds of sizes and shapes and types of wood. I bought three likely-looking variants, hoping that at least one would be good. All roughly the same size, but varying in angle, curvature and material.

What I didn’t think to do is take photos of the labels. They’re three different kinds of wood, but which ones?