Question: Some people usually use a spoon when eating spaghetti, and some do not.  

The proportion seems to be dependent on the country/region.

Has any data been published on the topic?  

Preferably raw poll result files, but aggregated data as CSV is OK too.

Bonus if the data is also sorted by age group and by formal/informal setting.

![Eating spaghetti with a spoon](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FNIIms.jpg)

Answer: 
No dataset was available, so I got 300+ people to answer a questionnaire about the topic.

General view of the data (green=spoon, red=no spoon):

![Spoon with spaghetti usage map](https://i.stack.imgur.com/39DvH.png)

* Detailed analysis: <http://aegif-labo.blogspot.jp/2015/04/eating-spaghetti-spoon-or-not.html>
* [Raw data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Xi8RHqxVapqNSc-a9J1UhAjrADzg0CRQxpzpk4m2ALQ/edit?usp=sharing) (as a Google Spreadsheet)
* License: Public domain
I find this question kind of silly, but it's a good "placeholder" for anecdotal questions that are popular with data-blogs and data-driven journalism.

See, for example, the "[Dear Mona](http://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/dear-mona/)" column at [fivethirtyeight.com](http://fivethirtyeight.com/).

To randomly select two:

* [Are prisoners more likely to be atheists?](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-prisoners-less-likely-to-be-atheists/)
* [How many Americans have never shot a gun?](http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/how-many-americans-have-never-shot-a-gun/)

---

So, I suspect you'll have to collect the data yourself. 

**Some ideas:**

* Post an online survey on [/r/SampleSize](http://www.reddit.com/r/SampleSize/)
* For geographical, aggregate data, contact Italian restaurants around the world with an email describing the project and a link to a simple web form. If you ~~spam~~ send to enough restaurants, you could have an interesting dataset. I know you are involved with Wikivoyage, and perhaps you can extract
* Pay a very little for a micro-advertising campaign. Google is the major player, but I think for this project a good medium would be [Twitter](https://ads.twitter.com). You could promote tweets to target regions, language-groups, or user-types, and those tweets would send users to a online survey. A cool thing is that once you start even a tiny advertising campaign, you get to see [analytics](https://twitter.com/philshem/status/586654700566642690) for all your tweets (even when the campaign is over).
* Create a twitter-bot that searches for the term "spaghetti" or something, then responds to those tweets with a link to an online form.
* Conduct polls on food blogs, forums, or [SeasonedAdvice](https://cooking.stackexchange.com/).
* Ask [Mona]. As a plus, their [datasets](https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data) have friendly licenses.

---

And in case anyone is curious:

> 
> ''Most restaurants (and hostesses) that feature pasta provide guests with a large spoon as well as the knife and fork. The fork is used to spear a few strands of spaghetti, the tips are placed against the spoon, which is held on its side, in the left hand, and the fork is twirled, wrapping the spaghetti around itself as it turns. If no spoon is provided, the tips of the fork may be rested against the curve of the plate.'' 
> 
> 
> 

[''The New Emily Post's Etiquette,'' Elizabeth L. Post, 1975 By CRAIG CLAIBORNE](http://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/19/garden/the-spoon-question-or-how-to-eat-pasta-like-an-expert.html)