Wouldn't that be another case for knurling like that common on metal knobs, where the grooves are too large a scale to trap clumps of bacteria? It'll prevent me

Wouldn't that be another case for knurling like that common on metal knobs, where the grooves are too large a scale to trap clumps of bacteria? It'll prevent mechanical scrubbing, but if a dishwasher is acceptable for cleaning between fork tines where the surfaces are blocked from direct spray, then the shadowed parts of a knurled surface shouldn't be a problem. Total surface area would of course increase, but only around double.* That'd be all, but I found something interesting when trying to look up what threshold of roughness is too coarse for trapping bacteria. Didn't end up finding that; the interesting fact is that despite bacteria growth increasing in most surfaces when deviating from a smooth polish, stainless steel actually exhibits less bacterial growth when roughened very finely, on the order of tens of nanometres of Ra (mean absolute deviation of height of a cross section from the mean line, though it seems the fractal nature of roughness means the order of magnitude of measurement depends on the measurement method). That's according to [1][2] and their citations; one of them gives an explanation of the cell membrane being limited by bend radius, so that when roughening a surface at a sufficiently small scale, the contact area bacteria can make decreases rather than increases. No idea about the implications of nanoscale surface finishing on gripping food, though. [1] Ctrl+F "surface roughness" https://doi.org/10.3389/fbioe.2021.643722 https://doi.org/10.3389/fbioe.2021.643722 [2] https://doi.org/10.1021/acsbiomaterials.7b00544 https://doi.org/10.1021/acsbiomaterials.7b00544 *nerdsnipe: By what factor of cut angle, pitch, and angle between passes does knurling increase surface area, if knurling is modelled as an extrude-cut along a line of a triangle wave profile into a face of the raw material, followed by a second pass of another at an angle to the first line, and completed by rolling the resulting face into a cylinder? The simple case of a 90 degree cut to full depth in only one direction increases profile length (and thus surface area) by sqrt(2), but does a second cut make something elegant like a tidy factor of 2?