Edible Dinnerware

I'm sitting here at my desk eating lunch. Now that Spring has arrived, I'm getting back into having salads for lunch. I love Romaine. But that is not my point of this post - this is - it occurs to me that I don't need the paper napkin I have left over from a trip to Quiznos last week (let's not go down that road), to wipe salad dressing off my face.

I have a plain slice of bread sitting here (naked bread you might say) and I realize that I could dab the corners of my mouth with this slice of bread. At the end of lunch I'll just eat my napkin (the bread one, not the paper one).




This will work at home, too, where we use cloth napkins instead of paper. Even though we are one evolutionary baby step closer to reduce, reuse, recycle, we still have to wash the cloth napkins every so often. Thus using precious water and heat.

Why not bread instead? (That sounds like a good slogan). Bread companies of the world take note - advertise your slices as tasty, "recyclable" dinner-ettiquettable (I know, but somebody has to come up the the new words in our language!) mouth daubers.

This gets me thinking about all the other things we use at meals that don't have to end up in the dishwasher on a regular basis. Celery knives and spoons. Carrot stick forks. Zuccini bowls. Pumpkin bakeware. I'm not exactly sure how we could fry up some eggs for breakfast, but I bet somebody's got an idea!

Actually, I remember eating at an Ethiopian restaurant in NYC and we sat at a traditional table. The food was served on this humungous (it had to be at least 3 feet in diameter) round of flat bread that was our communal plate. The waiter served us right from the pot of legumes. A big dollop right in the middle of the bread. We then tore off pieces of our plate and sort of used it as pincers or tongs to grab a bit of legume paste (this was more tasty than it sounds in writing, I swear!) and sort of rolled it up to eat it. The fish stew was a bit trickier. I highly recommend going to an Ethiopian restaurant that serves food in a traditional manner. This is a very good exercise for the "been there, did that" crowd.



So here's to food - may we all be as adaptable and indispensable as a radish cup.