NEW YORK.- The Smithsonian Institute´s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum presents the exhibit Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500–2005 through October 29, 2006. The show explores European and American dining through the design and function of eating implements. Until the late seventeenth century, individually designed flatware accompanied its owner as a reflection of social status and taste, but beginning in the eighteenth century hosts began to provide flatware for their guests, leading to greater uniformity of function-based forms. As food fashions changed across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, flatware design responded with forms appropriate to new foods and beverages.

These changes were subtle compared to those starting in the mid-nineteenth century, especially in the United States, when specialized pieces of flatware in numerous patterns and styles exploded on the scene. New technologies and materials, combined with broader wealth and a fervor for invention, shaped the design of flatware for generations. For the last five hundred years, the designs of knives, forks, and spoons have provided beautiful and useful extensions of our arms, turning the act of eating into the experience of dining.