New Zealand

Survey reveals half of Kiwis eat fries with... a fork!?

That is far, far too many of you.

Some disturbing new survey findings have revealed that 50% of Kiwis use a fork to munch on their french fries, which is just so, so wrong.

Possibly even worse is the 14% that eat tacos with cutlery, or the 10% that stab their fork into a sandwich. A surprisingly high 39% of New Zealanders even eat pizza with a knife and fork. All we have to ask is 'why?'.

Countdown conducted a study of over 1000 Kiwis to celebrate the release of their new Wiltshire Salisbury collectable cutlery range which you can use and abuse by collecting e-stamps when you use your Onecard.

Here is the complete list of food eaten with cutlery (% is the number of people who eat WITH cutlery):

  • Cake (80 per cent)

  • A pie (78 per cent)

  • Fries (50 per cent)

  • Fruit (47 per cent)

  • Pizza (39 per cent)

  • Burgers (34 per cent)

  • Tacos (14 per cent)

  • Sandwiches (10 per cent)

When it comes to the cutlery used to commit these culinary sins, Kiwis are a bit pickier than we imagined.

Two-thirds of those surveyed said they would mind if their cutlery is mismatched (a knife and fork each from a different cutlery set), really team? 23% of people doubled down on this, saying they would ONLY eat with a matching set. We can honestly say we've never noticed if our cutlery was matching or not - and it definitely wouldn't stop us from eating.

In the cuter findings, half of the respondents said they had at least one piece of cutlery they see as their favourite, and 37% said they had more than one favourite. Awww guys. Too forking cute. On the flip side, 7% said they don't have a favourite, but do have a least favourite, which isn't very knife of them.

Surprisingly, south-islanders are more likely to play favourites (57%) than their fellow kiwis up north (47%) - take that stereotypes.

When it comes to the not-so-great dishwasher debate, more people load their cutlery handle-side down (37%) into the dishwasher than handle-side up (27%).

We hope you've enjoyed this information that you probably didn't need to know. If you're someone who eats pizza with cutlery, please stop, it's just not OK.