Advertisement We’re speaking, quite obviously, of toothpicks.
At no other time of year will we encounter so many slivers of wood, steadfastly providing handles for the tiny meats and cheeses plucked from appetizer trays. Without them, our layers would lay limp, our holiday parties even more so.
So today, just days before Christmas, let us take a moment to consider what toothpicks mean to us.
For help, we turn to Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and history at Duke University, and the only man we know who owns a toothpick made from a dried walrus whisker.
Petroski also wrote “The Toothpick,” a new book (released just in time for toothpick season) that examines the history and cultural significance of this all-important tool.
To Petroski, the toothpick is more than a removal aid for between-the-teeth clutter. It is an example of smart engineering and design, one that has been around since nearly forever.
There’s evidence that early humans picked their teeth. Ancient Romans used toothpicks. American inventors revolutionized their availability in the 19th century with machines that churned them out much faster than the whittle-one-at-a-time method.
Then marketing people got involved, and wouldn’t you know it, Americans went crazy for the bulk-made wooden toothpick.
In 1960, the Forster toothpick company promoted the use of its product in making Christmas decorations. Consumers were encouraged to stick Styrofoam balls together with gobs of toothpicks. This created spheres that resembled “curled-up hedgehogs,” according to Petroski. The balls were then stacked in a Christmas tree-like formation and painted with fake snow. Petroski dug up a Forsters employee newsletter that described the promotion as being “directly responsible for the greatest run of toothpicks in the history of the industry.”
In other words, toothpicks were at one time hip. This may never happen again.
“Crafts aren’t today what they used to be,” Petroski says.
But toothpicks are still being turned into beautiful things.
Steven J. Backman of San Francisco works full time as a toothpick sculptor. He once spent more than two years assembling 30,000 toothpicks into a 13-foot-long sculpture of the Golden Gate Bridge. On commission, he sculpted the face of CNN broadcaster Lou Dobbs using toothpicks.
“I don’t look at the toothpick like every Joe in America,” he says. “For me, it’s not a utensil. It’s a medium I use to make art.
“I know it’s weird, but toothpicks are my life.”
For the rest of us, they simply aid us in sustaining it, keeping our fingers clean in the process.
A toothpick does not discriminate. Stabbed into a sauce-slathered cocktail wienie or nestled gently into fancy-thin layers of handcrafted dough, it performs its duties equally well.
Coleen Speaks, owner of Posh Nosh catering in Raleigh, N.C., uses old-fashioned toothpicks in only one of her recipes, rumaki. The Hawaiian dish involves water chestnuts, marinated chicken livers, ginger, curry, soy sauce and brown sugar wrapped in bacon, stuck with a toothpick and baked.
Otherwise, she uses party picks, an updated plastic version of the toothpick, for her appetizers.
A standard toothpick “makes me think of Swedish meatballs, circa 1970,” she says.
Meatballs, Swedish or otherwise, are most certainly delicious. But we understand her point. For some, technology and style have outwitted the simple wooden toothpick.
Then again, as Petroski writes in the epilogue of his book:
“A thing of beauty is indeed a joy forever, even if it is a lowly toothpick.”
