An innovative Indian company has come up with a brand new way of cutting back on plastic waste: crunchy and tasty cutlery that’s good enough to eat.
Founded in Hyderabad in 2011, Bakey’s makes sturdy, functional and edible spoons that you can munch on after you’ve finished eating with them. Made primarily from baked millet (because it uses less water to produce than rice does), the spoons comes in three flavours: plain, sweet and savoury, and are infused with flavours such as cumin seed and black pepper. And as well as being tasty, they’re full of crunch, guaranteed not to turn soggy if you use them to eat hot soup or dunk them in your tea.
In fact, by developing biodegradable utensils, Bakey’s have actually just come up with a new twist on something that India has been doing for centuries. Particularly in the south of the country, it’s traditional to serve and eat food from natural materials such as banana leaves, which are then wiped down to be used again, or thrown away and biodegrade in just a few days.
It’s only in recent years that people in India have moved away from these naturally environmentally-friendly solutions and have started increasingly to use disposable plastic utensils. And while Asia still uses far less plastic per capita than Western countries, the growth rate of the plastics industry in India one of the highest in the world.
With that ever-growing problem in mind, edible cutlery seems like an ideal solution. But there is one rather important issue that has come to our, and several other people’s, attention. Taking a closer look at the company’s Facebook page, it seems that the spoons, when ordered, are packaged and shipped in plastic. And if you really want, they can also package each spoon individually in a plastic pouch, more or less completely defeating the point of the product. Several people on Facebook have called on the company to switch to a more sustainable form of packaging. We’ll have to wait and see what their response will be.
To find out more about Bakey’s (and see the video that has already been viewed more than 4.5 million times on Facebook) just click on the link below.
