The New York Times uses the no‑utensil tasting menu at Naks, a new Filipino restaurant in Manhattan, as a springboard to explore why eating with our hands can be both sensually powerful and culturally charged. Touch, the author argues, completes flavor, yet in much of the West utensils became status symbols that enforced distance, hygiene rituals and social hierarchies, whereas across Africa, South and Southeast Asia and the Middle East hand‑eating traditions like Filipino kamayan have long embodied respect and conviviality. Tracing the fork’s late, aristocratic arrival in Europe, the piece shows how cutlery was exported with colonial power, while diners who still tear bread, roll rice or twirl noodles by hand were often dismissed as “primitive.” Contemporary chefs and restaurateurs such as Nicole Ponseca and Naks’s Eric Valdez now reclaim those practices, inviting guests to public hand‑washing stations and banana‑leaf feasts that celebrate unmediated contact with food. Scholars and philosophers cited in the article suggest that for adventurous Western diners the thrill of hand‑eating can verge on exoticism, yet they also note its potential to dismantle pretension and restore a visceral, communal pleasure to the table. Ultimately, the essay contends, dispensing with knives and forks is less regression than liberation: a conscious choice to feel temperature, texture and even slight messiness—reminding us that eating is an intimate, animal act we share across cultures.