Edible furniture, edible hotels and—perhaps the most useful of the bunch—edible tableware may sound a little like sci-fi, but it's not. The latest take on an edible plate is the brainchild of Polish wheat farmer and miller, Jerzy Wysocki, decided to figure out a way to exploit the excess wheat bran he found himself in possession of every time he had milled his wheat over ten years ago. By sheer coincidence, Wysocki discovered that if he mixed wheat bran with water, heated and pressurized it, something happened: The bran turned into a light, sturdy organic material. Wysocki almost instantly saw that there was potential in the flat wheat. So he built a machine on his farm and began producing biodegradable (and edible), disposable tableware which he markets under the name Biotrem.
Apart from the obvious environmental benefits as an alternative to the use of plastic—the plates were the "official festival plate" at this years Oya Festival in Norway—the edibility makes it possible that disposable tableware in the future will be able to become an integrated part of the meal. And the fact that the Polish bran plates' rustic, grain-brown appearance only make them more appetizing to health food conscious people.
According to Martin Lehrmann from Eat a Plate, which sells the plates in Denmark, work is currently being done in order to make the plate more water resistant. If you put the bran under even more pressure, the fibers will begin to even out, and liquids will have a harder time gathering in the texture of the plate. But for now, as long as the food being served isn't too fluid, the plate won't collapse. Hot porridge, for example, is no problem.
The edible plate might not actually be that edible, but that doesn't change the fact that biodegradable material is a welcome alternative to plastic, styrofoam, and cardboard. A pair of plastic plates here and there, from a children's birthday or a summer festival, might seem like a drop in the ocean, but if we, as estimated, will be dropping 17.5 million tons of plastic into the world's oceans by 2025, we might as well start doing something about that by changing the way our burritos and birthday cakes are served.
