• Etiquette expert William Hanson suggests eating cereal with both a fork and spoon to be more “proper.”
  • We asked other etiquette pros to weigh in.
  • When it comes to cereal, you may want to focus on avoiding slurping and spilling instead.

Having good manners certainly matters. We all know the basics, like saying "please" and "thank you," keeping your elbows off the table and your finger out of your nose. But every now and then, an etiquette rule comes along that throws us for a loop.

Case in point: British etiquette expert William Hanson recently claimed we've all been eating cereal in a very rude way our entire lives.

In an Instagram reel, Hanson demonstrates his preferred method: “First of all, add your milk of choice and then, with a spoon held in your dominant hand and the fork in your non-dominant hand, you will eat.”

He explained that it's not like soup, where you have to scoop away from you, but rather, "you can use the fork to push some corn flakes onto your spoon and eat accordingly."

Naturally, this sent the internet into a tailspin, with commenters adding notes to the post like, "I can’t tell if this is rage bait or not," and "Who uses a fork for cereal?"

According to other etiquette pros, the answer is: almost no one.

"God bless William Hanson. I love this man, and, as a general rule, align with his approach to modern etiquette standards," Jo Hayes, an etiquette expert and founder of EtiquetteExpert.Org, shared with Good Housekeeping. "Whether this is typical. The answer is no. I have literally never seen anyone eat cereal with a spoon and fork, and I have attended many a hotel breakfast dining room, and many a formal corporate breakfast."

However, that said, Hayes did note that adding a fork to your cereal repertoire does actually make a lot of good manners sense, "making the eating of cereal more delicate, polite, and orderly."

As to why we don't normally pick up both a fork and a spoon, Hayes explained that usually a cereal bowl is smaller with higher sides, which "essentially does the ‘job of the fork’, in helping to get the cereal onto the fork." But if a bowl is shallower, a fork may come in handy to aid in this maneuver.

Hayes isn't the only expert to think this way, either.

"We normally use forks when eating pancakes, waffles, or eggs, where scooping, stabbing, or cutting is involved," Nikki Sawhney, an etiquette expert and founder of the New England School of Protocol, said. The only time we need to add the fork is for convenience. "Maybe you are trying to break apart a cluster of granola, separate the toppings like berries from milk, or push the cereal chunks onto your spoon with a fork and help prevent spillage," she added.

Nick Leighton, the etiquette expert behind Were You Raised By Wolves?, agreed with the above, but added that there is one other issue we should all focus on instead: "The real etiquette problem to worry about with cereal is slurping or getting too much onto your spoon at once and spilling," he said. "If your dining companion just slurps it down, it's good to remember that it's generally not polite to correct other people's etiquette, and we'd just pretend we didn't notice."

While Sawhney added that using a fork and spoon to eat cereal isn’t necessarily wrong, it can make a simple meal unnecessarily complicated.

"The purpose of etiquette is not to make dining stressful or uncomfortable; however, using a fork and spoon can make eating cereal with two utensils complex," Sawhney said. "If a spoon works well, no need to add another utensil."