Photo: Bakey’s
Bakey’s, a company established in 2010 in India, makes Edible Cutlery as an alternative to disposable plastic/wood cutlery and bamboo chopsticks. Their Edible Cutlery is meant to be eaten after use, but if you don’t want to eat it, you can throw it away and insects and stray animals will eat them or they will degrade naturally in less than three days.
These eco-friendly and disposable cutlery are made of flours, which are needed with plain water- they are 100% natural without any additional chemicals or preservatives. Bakey’s decided on the flour Jowar (sorghum), a millet. Why sorghum? Groundwater depletion can be attributed to farmers, the largest lifters of groundwater, who have started moving to cultivation of rice, which is a water guzzler. It needs 60 times more water compares to millets and we are producing more rice than we eat, leaving it rotting in warehouses, which means that for a million tons of rice in the warehouse, we are lifting and wasting 5 cubic meters of water! Bakey’s asks- how rational is this? Is there social justice?
Bakey’s developed a groundwater estimate model and found that, if the rice are were to decrease by 25%, the depleting trends would reverse. However it is administratively impossible to implement this, therefore, they hit upon the idea of creating market forces so that farmers will gradually shift back to millets; hence jowar (sorghum) was selected as the raw material for their cutlery. Not only is sorghum nutritious, but Bakey’s add various flavors to the flour as per consumer’s choice, like- hot and spicy, onion and tomato, garlic, ginger, spicy or sweet.
Bakey’s initiative will also be able to counter the rapidly increasing trends in use of plastic disposable cutlery, which contains several toxins that are a health hazard to both ourselves and the environment. Thus, in their endeavor to create an alternative to plastic, they are not harming the environment. Instead, Bakey’s Edible Cutlery goes the other way, by helping the environment, our health and society.
For more information, visit their website at http://www.bakeys.com/
Written by Kathleen Emerson (3/30/16)