A History of Western Eating Utensils, From the Scandalous Fork to the Incredible Spork:
But first back to the fork, which has the most checkered past of all eating utensils. In fact, the seemingly humble instrument was once considered quite scandalous, as Ward writes. In 1004, the Greek niece of the Byzantine emperor used a golden fork at her wedding feast in Venice, where she married the doge’s son. At the time most Europeans still ate with their fingers and knives, so the Greek bride’s newfangled implement was seen as sinfully decadent by local clergy. “God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks—his fingers,” one of the disdainful Venetians said. “Therefore it is an insult to him to substitute artificial metal forks for them when eating.” When the bride died of the plague a few years later, Saint Peter Damian opined that it was God’s punishment for her hateful vanity.
In the comments below no one pointed to scientific literature why eating with hands is more hygienic. I’m not really interested in your opinion. I don’t know the literature, but using Google Scholar doesn’t indicate that it is more hygienic. That being said, there’s an issue of correlation: people who live in poor and diseased environments are much more likely to eat with their hands than those who do not.