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An Alternative to Plastic Utensils: Edible Cutlery!

If you order takeout from Seamless, there’s a button you can check off so the restaurant won’t bring you plastic cutlery. If only we could click on that button to end all plastic cutlery. Of all the things we could devote petroleum to, producing disposable cutlery seems silly.

India-based entrepreneur Narayana Peesapathy has a much more intelligent alternative. He’s developed edible cutlery, specifically spoons, worked out a way to mass produce them, and reckons he can get the production cost down on par with plastic:

Peesapathy is a serious big-picture thinker. What’s not obvious from the video is that he’s considered a lot more than just avoiding plastic for its harmful effects; by using flour derived from sorghum, he’s attempting to balance out the Indian agricultural ecosystem:

[The] depletion of groundwater can be arrested by creating markets for less irrigation demanding crops such as jowar (sorghum). The edible cutlery is made from flours of this crop.

Demand for power from the agriculture sector [is] not commensurate [with] its contribution to the GDP and on the contrary is creating pressures on other sectors, notably on the manufacturing sector. This is largely because of…faulty crop choices. This initiative could help in triggering the right crop mix (even districts with scanty rainfall are registering increasing trends in water guzzling rice crop).

Our readers in India can currently order the spoons, either flavored or plain, from Peesapathy’s company, Bakey’s. For those outside of India, the company is accepting orders in quantities of 2,000 to 20,000 units, ready to ship as of August 2016.