PESHAWAR, May 22: Despite being considered as outdated and old fashioned by city people, wooden cutlery is still in use in rural areas. A visitor to wholesale markets of the city notices cutlery shops displaying wooden spoons, blenders, flour kneading plates, curd mixer on offer for sale.

Most of these products, remnant of handmade wooden utensils of the past, have poor finishing but are attractively coloured.

“We still have wooden cutlery customers, that is why these items are being made and sold,” said Iqbal Muhammad, an elderly shopkeeper in main Dabgari Bazaar in the interior city while talking to APP.

Iqbal, who has been in the business for last 40 years, said majority of his customers are villagers.

“Almost 90 per cent of the people who demand wooden cutlery are of rural background”, he added.

Wooden products, especially cutlery, are mostly made in Punjab and dealers in Peshawar purchase them in bulk for onward supply to villages, Iqbal said and added that there was lukewarm response from urban population to such household items because they considered it outdated and old-fashioned. He said The city dwellers had now switched over to stainless steel cutlery and porcelain crockery.

Another shopkeeper Niaz Ali observed that use of wooden products by the villagers was because of their cheap price.

“Wooden utensils are cheaper than stainless steel or aluminium products. Furthermore, people who use wooden cutlery are of a belief that meal cooked in clay pottery with the help of a wooden spoon is better in taste”, he added.

Answering a question as to why elderly people still go for wooden pots, Niaz said over years they develop a taste for meal prepared with wooden cutlery and are reluctant to eat meal cooked in metal utensils.

Haji Zahir Shah, a villager and user of wooden cutlery, while supporting the view point of Niaz Ali, said wood is not harmful to health while steel and other metals are processed in different chemicals during their production and contain elements that could affect human health.

Renowned Hindko writer, scholar and Peshawar culture expert, Mukhtar Ali Nayyar (Tamgha-i-Imtiaz), gave his opinion that wooden products made their way into Peshawar and its suburbs from Chitral and Northern Areas. He said people in Chitral and Northern Areas had wood in abundance. They used mulberry for making crockery and the practice reached Peshawar and its adjoining areas. Wooden products, he continued, were also used in Punjab.

Abdul Azeem, Assistant Director, Department of Archaeology and Museums, while explaining use of wooden products from historical perspective, said archaeological evidence in the area established that use of wooden cutlery was not very old in the region.

The wooden utensils discovered from different archaeological sites are about 100 to 120 years old, and in the archaeological term are referred to as ethnological material, the products which were in use 50 to 60 years back in society.

However, he admitted that use of wooden products was as old as humans themselves because man had started using wood right from very beginning. —APP