Yes I’m doing a review on a SPORK. Yeah, it’s a little tongue in cheek (pun intended), but I am serious about it. When it comes to camping gear I am a minimalist at heart. Hence the attraction to the SPORK. Minimal is fine but it has to work and that’s where this simple utensil rises above the rest.
Remember, it’s the littlest of things that often make the biggest difference.
Over the years I’ve tried most everything out, from full on utensil sets to just the simplest bamboo mini sporks. Remember those nesting utensil sets we used in Boy Scouts? I’ve tried them all. You might think the simple SPORK would be the answer and you would almost be right.
Not all SPORKS are created equal.
The humangear Gobites Uno Travel / Camping Spork is
The website says “The Uno includes a spoon deep enough to slurp soup and low-curvature edges to scrape container walls.The fork has tines long enough to twirl spaghetti and splitter tines on each edge for easy soft-food splitting.” and I can agree!
In contrast, so many of the other nylon/plastic utensils out there right now, this one is smooth. Most of the others I’ve seen have a mat or textured finish. My guess is that they do that because they want to make it easy to hold or less likely to slip but in using this Spork I can’t say that I’ve had a hard time holding on to it, even in colder weather.
Have you tried slurping soup off an old bamboo spoon? It’ll tear up your mouth pretty quick. The smoothness of the humangear Spork has a great ‘mouth feel’ to it but it goes beyond that.
The shape of both the spoon and the fork side just seem to feel better than the others. The fork ends are tapered and long enough to spear food that you want (as in chunks of chicken), or twirl (as in a long pasta noodle). There’s also a bevel or taper on the outside of the fork tangs that that I believe adds to that mouth feel I mentioned.
I also like that the end of the spoon side is flattened for better scraping. If I’m not cooking in a pouch I’m usually burning the food in the bottom of the pan. The flatter ended spoon works good for scraping all those tasty bits.
The ‘bowl’ of the spoon is also ample enough to get a good slurp with. It also has a nice curve to it. It’s a fine line, too much bowl and it takes up too much room in your pack, too little and you might as well be eating with a stick. The curve of the handle gives you the ability to get into the depths of the pouch.
What’s not to like? That’s a tough one. I’d really like something that was shorter in length. I don’t want a mini utensil, just a shorter shaft in-between the two business ends if that makes sense.
There’s are millions of options out there and I think I’ve tried most of them. For years my go to spork was the Light My Fire and while it worked I really didn’t think about how it could be better until I tried the humangear version.
One of the things I never liked about the Light My Fire is that little knife built into the fork side. I carry a perfectly good real knife in my kit so I’ve never seen the reasoning behind putting one into the Spork design. Besides, more than once I’ve ripped a little out of the corner of my mouth eating overly aggressively.
I can’t ignore the basic model either – the REI Spork that everyone seems to have or had.
There’s a lot that I like and there’s a lot that I am so happy we’ve improved on since this was 1st introduced. I do like the fact that both ends are incorporated into one end. That means I can (and have) cut the end of the handle off so that it is lighter and fits into my camp mug. The fork tines are minimal and way to short to anything with and the spoon bowl is abnormally wide. The handle itself has little or no curve to it so trying to scoop out of the bottom of the pouch is tough.
TITANIUM?
In doing background research I found out they do the same Spork in Ti!
How cool is that?
I know what I want for my birthday!
While you might think of the Spork as just something to shove food down your gullet, it’s the littlest of things that can make a big difference. The humangear Gobites Uno Camping Spork took something simple and made it better – much better! Seriously, try this spork out and you’ll never use anything else!