How...civilized?

I have been having some seriously weird ideas lately. Yesterday on my way home I was thinking about the perils of music superstardom, and later that evening I got onto the civilised forms of dining etiquette. My girlfriend god bless her, is still in the mindframe that everything I say is either pure comedic gold, or divinely inspiring, from the mouth of god himself.

This might be a slight exaggeration, but let's say that she's really into me, which is always a great confidence booster.

In any event, I got to thinking, who ever thought that eating with a fork and knife was more civilized? I mean, for millenia, the Pharaoh at food with his fingers. Due to his position as God among men, his very touch blessed the food so that anything touching his lips was sacred. In certain parts of the country, touching your food before eating it is seen as a taciturn way of showing pleasure...or at very least it was an affirmation before all that this food is viewed as clean.

Not so in "The Western Civilization". Where we live, we have much more class. We tear the flesh of our dead animals from their bones with miniaturized tridents, sawing and rending the flesh in smaller pieces with a blade. Once we have dessicated the pre-mutilated limbs of our hunt, we stab the pieces again with these skewers (more politely referred to as Forks) and pull the meat directly from the point with our mouth.

Am I the only one who sees this as being slightly barbaric?