Titanium Spork

Coloured metal usually means coated metal, and a coating on a camp utensil is a countdown: it chips, it flakes, it ends up in your food. Snow Peak's blue spork has no coating on it at all.

The Titanium Spork is anodized rather than painted, which means a controlled oxide layer is grown on the surface of the metal and the colour comes from nothing more than how thick that layer is allowed to get. Blue, purple and green are the same titanium in three different oxide thicknesses, and there is a fourth version left uncoloured in natural titanium. The same oxide layer that produces the colour also does the protective work, keeping rust and other contaminants off the metal, so the finish is not sitting on top of the spork waiting to come off. It is the spork.

It weighs 16 grams, runs 6.5 inches long and carries a 1.6 inch head, which makes it one of the lighter things in a typical camp kit and small enough for a shirt pocket or a pack pouch. It is a single spoon-and-fork piece rather than a two-part set. Snow Peak machines it in Tsubame-Sanjo, the Niigata town with the long metalworking history that the company also calls home, and markets its titanium line as built to last a lifetime rather than a season. Its own product page pairs the spork with a Trek titanium bowl or a Ti-Double mug, which is roughly how these things accumulate.