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We spelunk through obscure data for a living, and yet this is not a sentence we ever dreamed we would write: Only 35 percent of Americans own sporks.

We know this because David Montgomery got salty about steak knives. Specifically, he was appalled when a knifeless friend “tried to argue that there was nothing weird about not owning steak knives.”

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We here at the Department of Data are dedicated to exploring the weird and wondrous power of the data that defines our world. <a href="https://washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/29/dept-of-data/" target=_blank>Read more.</a>

Montgomery, a longtime data journalist and <a href="http://thesiecle.com/" target=_blank>French-history podcaster</a>, just happened to have the means to test this friend’s bold assertion. He works at YouGov, the same polling outfit that taught us <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/03/24/cruises-covid-politics/" target=_blank>Republicans like cruises</a>. So, <a href="https://today.yougov.com/consumer/articles/47875-how-common-are-your-kitchen-utensils" target=_blank>he asked precisely 1,000 U.S. adults about the contents of their kitchen</a>.

“I can only think of a few better uses of survey research than to settle group chat debates,” Montgomery told us.

We’re pretty sure he won the argument — about 91 percent of Americans own at least one steak knife, not far behind forks, spoons and dinner knives (99, 98 and 96 percent). But we’re not that interested in Montgomery’s steak squabbles. We’re still stuck on sporks.

Unlike most utensils, the spork is a young man’s game. Men are a little more likely to own them than women (38 percent to 31 percent), and adults under age 30 seem to be much more likely to be sporked up than their retirement-age friends (58 percent to 25 percent), though margins of error grow wider in these narrow groups.

About half of Black and Hispanic Americans own sporks, compared with just 29 percent of Whites. Along with age, this might help explain why Democrats are much sporkier than Republicans (47 percent to 27 percent). That’s a bigger partisan gap than we see with, to pick one fractious example, reusable straws.

But that’s just utensils. To pad out his poll, Montgomery asked about a whole battery of kitchen tools. And among those, the biggest partisan gaps were in ricers (a jumbo garlic press for <a href="https://www.bonappetit.com/story/ricer-for-mashed-potatoes" target=_blank>smooshing spuds</a>), chopsticks, mandoline slicers and manual juicers — all of which were more popular among Democrats and Biden voters.

Again, the partisan gap probably reflects an age gap. Those same four kitchen items are also the only four that are substantially more popular among adults under 30 than with adults of retirement age, and America’s youths have long <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/08/biden-youth-vote-democrats/" target=_blank>leaned</a> left.

For most items, though, the age gap reverses, which seems reasonable. If you’ve had to clean out an older relative’s kitchen, you’ve perhaps noticed that the older you get, the more weird kitchen detritus you accumulate. In particular, older Americans are more likely to have a ladle, a strainer or colander, and a spatula or tongs.

Writ large, we’re about as likely to own chopsticks (48 percent) as we are a garlic press (47 percent). Folks in the Northeast are more likely to own a garlic press than the rest of us, while chopsticks are more popular out West.

The kitchen’s unsung hero must be the spatula. It gets more frequent use than any other tool in the poll — almost two-thirds of us own one and use it frequently. Other workhorses include cutting boards, can openers and measuring cups.

The rolling pin is the kitchen’s leading dust collector, with 22 percent of us owning one and never using it. Chopsticks and food thermometers similarly languish in the least-opened, most-chaotic drawer in the kitchen.

The two most confusing objects in our kitchens appear to be the zester and the mandoline slicer. An impressive 12 and 15 percent of us, respectively, didn’t know whether we owned one. The comparable number for a less-perplexing item, such as a whisk or a measuring spoon, was just 2 percent.

It’s perhaps not just a happy accident that those most-perplexing zesters and mandolines are also the two items with the biggest ownership gap between self-described “great” cooks and the rest of us. For example, 65 percent of great cooks own a zester, while just 37 percent of the good-, okay- or terrible-cooking masses do.

The most ominous part of the whole survey? Apparently America has not yet reached peak kitchen clutter. About 27 percent of us would prefer to own more kitchen tools, while only 17 percent want fewer.

Which adults are most likely to live with an adult sibling?

Anne Lutes wrote from Chapel Hill, N.C., bearing glad tidings: “My two 20-something daughters just bought a house together,” she wrote. That led her to wonder how many adult siblings live together, whether they rent or own, what their demographics are and whether their numbers have changed over time.

Stellar questions, Anne! But first things first. Congratulations to both your daughters! They’ve somehow joined an even more exclusive club than that of millennials and zoomers who own a home in their 20s: They’re some of the few American siblings who are building a household together.

Only about 2.3 out of every 100 U.S. households are led by adult siblings. Though if we just look at folks in their 20s, it’s 5 percent, according to our analysis of the Census Bureau’s always awe-inspiring American Community Survey.

Building on “Golden Girls”-inspired <a href="https://www.bgsu.edu/content/dam/BGSU/college-of-arts-and-sciences/NCFMR/documents/FP/julian-older-adults-living-roommate-sibling-2020-fp-22-32.pdf" target="_blank">methodology</a> developed by the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University south of Toledo, we focused on households like that of Anne’s daughters, where one of the siblings led the household.

That ensures we aren’t counting situations where two young-adult siblings live together, but do so under their parents’ or <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/03/23/how-these-grandparents-became-americas-unofficial-social-safety-net/" target="_blank">grandparents’</a> roof. Zoomer and millennial adults living at home is a different column entirely.

Anne also asked about ownership status. Her daughters’ situation is not uncommon! Almost 1 in 10 households helmed by a homeowner under age 25 includes a sister or brother. The rate has almost doubled since the early 2000s, hinting that your kids’ strategy has become one of the few available paths to homeownership at that age. Renters the same age join forces with siblings at about half that rate. But as we age into our 30s and beyond, renters become the ones more likely to be sharing with a sibling.

At every age, less-educated Americans are more likely to live with a sibling. But one of the best predictors of sibling symbiosis is actually a Hispanic background. Hispanic Americans are more than twice as likely as most Americans to join forces with their sisters and brothers.

Hispanic Americans built such a lead on their neighbors because not only are they much more likely to stay with siblings in their 20s and 30s, they’re also much more likely to be in their 20s and 30s than other groups. (The typical Hispanic American is 30, while the typical White person without a Hispanic background is 44, our analysis shows).

Asian Americans run a close second, and just about everybody — name your race, ethnicity or age group — is more likely to live with their siblings than White folks are.

Black Americans stand out in a different way. They’re not as likely to live with siblings when they’re younger, but once they hit their late 50s they become more likely to adopt the sibling life than anybody else.

Our new friend Anne (she said she was a huge fan of our column!) also asked about trends in living with your siblings. It has slowly become more commonplace over the two decades for which we have data. Just about every age group has a jump, though Americans in their early 60s have easily seen the sharpest shift.

In that age group, sibling households have become twice as common. In fact, everyone from age 50 to 74 has seen a substantial increase, albeit in a phenomenon that was pretty rare to begin with.

This rise coincides with another shift: Americans who have never married, long the backbone of America’s sibling-roommate population, are being overtaken in older ages by divorced or separated folks. Widows and widowers have seen a similarly sharp rise, as have the small-but-growing population of married Americans who have taken in a sibling who might not have had anywhere else to land.

Why are these folks moving in with their siblings? It’s not just that they’re having physical difficulty living independently or getting around. Folks with those sorts of disabilities make up a relatively small minority of siblings living with siblings, and in most cases their numbers haven’t risen any faster than those of their more able-bodied friends.

If not siblings, who are Americans living with?

Having poured our heart and soul into measuring siblings, we realized we now had the wherewithal to measure cohabitation of any kind — specifically, we can measure how likely you are to be cohabiting with at least one person of any given group.

If you’re out on your own at age 20, you’re most likely to be living with at least one roommate — assuming you’re not living solo. By 22, roomies have been replaced by romantic partners. By your mid-20s, kids surge into the top spot. They remain there until you hit your early 50s, at which point you’re most likely to live with a spouse. Until, that is, you hit your late 70s. Then mortality takes its toll and you’re most likely to be living alone. Again.

“This may not be susceptible to data analysis, but I would like to know, geographically or otherwise, why some people eat their corn on the cob horizontally, from end to end, and others eat it vertically, around and around.”

We fear this may be unanswerable. But last year, YouGov actually asked whether Americans prefer their corn on or off the cob. Americans’ (accurate and understandable) preference for on-the-cob corn remained steady across demographics, with the exception of age: The younger you are, the more likely you are to prefer your corn cobless.

The survey didn’t ask about corn orientation, but maybe we just need to get David Montgomery worked up enough to poll it? If he asked 1,000 Americans about steak knives out of <a href="https://www.numlock.com/p/numlock-news-november-16-2023-f1" target=_blank>spite</a>, surely he would poll typewriter-style corn consumption! Are any of you on a group chat with him?

Good day, friends! The Department of Data humbly requests your quantitative queries. What are the most common killers of married U.S. males — that is, literal <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/11/26/anxiety-masked-heart-attack/" target=_blank>widowmakers</a>? Which jobs are <a href="https://eig.org/full-vs-hybrid-remote-work/" target=_blank>opting for hybrid over fully remote work</a>? What are the <a href="https://www.semafor.com/article/11/21/2023/why-aryeh-bourkoff-of-liontree-invested-in-a-gulf-gas-company" target=_blank>world’s largest sovereign wealth funds</a>? <a href="https://thewashingtonpost.formstack.com/forms/department_of_data_questions" target=_blank>Just ask!</a>

If your question inspires a column, we’ll send an official Department of Data button and ID card. This week we’re sending one to our friend in Rockville, and another to Anne in Chapel Hill. We’ll pack extra buttons for her cohabiting kids, who played such a pivotal role in this week’s column.

University of Oklahoma

University of Missouri

Andrew Van Dam writes the Department of Data column each week for The Washington Post. He has covered economics and wrangled data and graphics for The Post and the Wall Street Journal. 

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The political and demographic divides in kitchen-tool ownership, and more!