I'm a bit puzzled about this. In my area, most people are righthanded,
and when eating with a spoon, will use the right hand. But when using a
knife and fork - which is how most main dishes are eaten - they will
have the fork in the left hand, and the knife in the right - means they
feed themselves with the non dominant hand. Thus this is learned in
childhood and provides no big problem following a purely physical injury
as it's only going from fork to spoon. Same with scissor cutting - most
grown up people have had a pair of scissors in their non dominant hand
at least once in a while: When they're cutting their nails on their
dominant hand.
For those reasons, if I observed severe self feeding problems, or
complete inability to use scissors in a non dominant hand, I'd look for
other reasons such as apraxia.
Well, I would say your cultural usage of both hands for utensil feeding trains better Fine Motor in the non-dominant hand. As I said, I couldn't do the button hook with my left myself, and I don't consider myself very apraxic. That could really even be a study - how many fine motor tasks can persons who in adulthood lose the use of their dominant hand learn to do with the former non - dominant, and compare North Americans with Europeans. My hypothesis would be the Europeans would use the former non-dominant better as a new dominant than the North Americans Jody
