You can have the spoon and eat it too! The spoon is just not edible but also nutritious. Edible cutlery offers an interesting alternative to the non-biodegradable plastic ones. "Sale of plastic cutlery, growing at a rate of about 30 per cent, is generating significant non-biodegradable waste and contributing to overflowing landfills. Edible cutlery is the only solution that provides the same convenience of disposable forks, spoons and chopsticks," says Narayana Peesapaty, managing director of the Hyderabad-based startup BK Environmental Innovations Private Limited, which developed edible cutlery by baking a mix of sorghum (jowar), rice and wheat flour. A splash of color is added to the cutlery by including spinach (green), beet root (red) or carrot (orange) pulp to the product mix. Some hotels are already using it, but its wide spread use is still a debate.

Since the concept is likely to benefit jowar farmers, we have to take every occasion to popularize this cutlery. We might use it in offices and during conferences and workshops. Of course we don't expect our delegates to gobble these spoons and forks,  but they are at least biodegradable. They needn't even be washed with detergent and water like steel cutlery. Aren't we saving water? How about using the used edible cutlery as animal feed?