When Disposable Plates are Green
by Collin Dunn, Corvallis, OR, USA on 03.27.08
Products like disposable chopsticks, disposable diapers and disposable coffee cups have often drawn TreeHugger's ire for adding more mass to the waste stream, and while compostable tableware and other biodegradable kitchen goods are a step in the right direction, you often need a compost heap to get them to fully break down.
As a solution to this -- a way to cut out the middle man, as it were -- Japanese designer Nobuhiko Arika has created a collection of edible tableware, a set of truly disposable dinnerware that includes a plate, bowl and chopsticks. Made from hardtack, a biscuit dough made from flour, water and salt that has traditionally been used as dry emergency rations at sea, the collection is designed to replace disposable dishware with one twist: you can eat it when you're done.
These "dishes" will keep for months when kept dry; it might not be the best solution for your morning bowl of cereal, or hot bowl of soup, but for drier goods, the dishes might add a nice cracker course to your meals on the go. The pieces are being produced by the Designing10 in Fukuoka, Japan, from April 25 to 29. What will they come up with next? via ::dezeen
according to my grandfather, the 'traditional hardtack' tasted horrible.
:)~
Can these really hold liquid food like soup? Hopefully they will not end up being eaten as well. They look like cookies yummy.,
I don't know that this is necessarily a great idea. As with any disposable, you'd need to buy more than with a "permanent" item, but I think my biggest quibble comes in terms of portion size.
So, you can eat the plate when you're done, great. But that looks like an awful lot of plate, and hard tack is really dense stuff. On top of the meal itself, you have this whole other calorie load to deal with? You might as well just put some jam on the plate and call it lunch. Contrariwise, you get through a portion of the thing after you've eaten your -real- meal, and end up with a bunch of broken tableware that you don't feel up to finishing. What would you do with one chopstick and 1/3 of a plate? Save them for later, when you have more hardtack flatware looming in the cupboard? This becomes even more wasteful if, as Liz mentioned, it doesn't taste good.
This seems to be a case of reinventing the wheel (and similar to the biofuels debate, using food resources for non- or quasi-food applications) when we already have fairly elegant solutions to this particular problem, in the form of non-disposables, biodegradeables, and recyclables.
That would kill me, or at least make me wish I was dead. A celiac's worst nightmare is gluten filled containers.
I just met a gal who is deathly allergic to corn, and now all those corn plastic containers are everywhere. I really feel for her, and am grateful they aren't made out of wheat.
If we're going to eat our plates, why don't we just slop our food right on the table to begin with? I do like ice cream cones though, so who knows. Oh, and those tortilla chip salad bowls, and soup served in scooped out bread.
I agree, if this tastes like cardboard, it is potentially just as wasteful as any other disposable.
I think if we should have learned anything at this point is that using food resources to make anything other than food is not a good idea.
But you can't eat the pollution that delivered the stacks of bowls and plates. Stupid idea.
I could so eat that plate ;)
Has anyone ever tried Pandan cake? You can usually get it from a supermarket specialising in Chinese foods.
Try it, it is so soft and tastes amazing!