Over on r/answers, someone was claiming that there was a population boom (claimed by different pop history sources to be in either 400 BC or AD) that resulted in shortages. This, in turn, inspired Chinese cooks to cut meat into small pieces that required table utensils to eat. And, thus, chopsticks were adapted from cooks' tools into tableware.

This sounds kind of fishy to me, mostly because I can't find solid historical sources for any of that. Even Wikipedia implies chopsticks came into popular use as eating utensils in the Ming Dynasty, not the 5th century BC or AD.

So, is there an agreed upon historical consensus for how it actually happened? My instinct is that the bite sized cuts of meat in Chinese cuisine happened organically, probably for cultural reasons.

Are there attested population booms that resulted in food or material shortages? And when did all of this happen?