Sporks only pretend to be useful; they aren’t. Their fork tines are often too short to maintain a grip on tougher bits of food, and so wide they slice through anything soft. They disrupt the more graceful edge of the spoon, preventing it from accessing the corners of a bowl or other container. And yet, sporks have become standard issue for campers everywhere. The world doesn’t need any more sporks. Thankfully, Gerber’s new piece of trail cutlery, the Compleat, isn’t a spork — it’s a multi-tool.
In one 2.3-ounce package, the Compleat packs a fork, spoon, dual-edge — one serrated, one rubberized — spatula and a tiny tool that campers can use to open bottles, packages, and cans and peel vegetables. By all means, this should produce an overpacked tool that’s either unwieldy or one that can perform its multiple functions without excelling at them; a dud. Gerber sidestepped these traps by giving the Compleat a construction that’s more modular than fixed, as traditional multi-tools are. Each of the tool’s implements slides apart from one another at the end of the handle for independent usage. Combine the spatula with either the fork or spoon to create a pair of tongs.
The Compleat is 7.75 inches long. The spatula is made of heat-resistant nylon with a silicone overmold on one edge while the fork, spoon and tool are anodized aluminum. Even the most severe ounce-counting campers will have a hard time turning down all of the tool’s utility to save weight in a backpack. Especially when the alternative is a spork.