Translator: Rhonda Jacobs Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
The cat was not yet out of the bag,
I expect the [inaudible] pull the cat out of the bag.
But I'm going to pull it out of my pocket -
and that is this.
Have you ever thought you can eat a spoon?
(Crunches)
(Laughter)
You can eat it.
This is in response to the fact that change is inevitable,
and we're suffering too much of changes in our life.
One change is a lot of plastic.
I created this edible cutlery
as an alternative to plastic, disposable cutlery.
And I want to say that through this story, through this journey,
I want to take you through what I have actually done
in order to achieve this.
The change that I was trying to address is water scarcity.
I come from India, and in India, more than half of our nation
is living under severe groundwater scarcity conditions,
groundwater depletion, in terms of quality and in quantity.
Edible cutlery and groundwater depletion, what is the connection?
That's what I will talk to you about now.
We have-
I've been looking at why is groundwater depleting.
Is it because of less rain due to leaching of groundwater
when you lose rain water?
But I found that over the five-year moving average,
I found that long-term data shows
there's no significant change in the total precipitation.
That means the rainfall is almost constant.
Then why is groundwater depleting?
Then I realized that the groundwater lifting is mostly done by the farmers,
and they are moving into unsustainable agriculture.
The moment the farmer strikes groundwater,
he's shifting from dryland crops like millet,
which is taking a downward trend,
and is replacing it with water-guzzling rice.
To give you an idea of what it means, one acre of rice, not cultivated,
the water sill can support 60 acres of millet.
In other words, if you look at it conversely,
one acre of millet, which is being replaced by rice,
water extraction is going up 60 times, or 6,000 percent.
This, in my opinion, is a sheer waste of natural resources.
I say this because over the years,
we are looking at a steady, constant
rotting of rice in the warehouses.
Millions of tons of rice is rotting in the warehouse,
and we need not produce so much rice.
And every year, in spite of millions of tons of rice rotting in the warehouses,
every year, on average, 200,000 hectares of new area is [being planted with] rice,
and this has to be stopped.
If we can bring down the proliferation of rice area getting added every year,
the depleting trends in the groundwater will reverse and it'll start replenishing.
That was my motivation.
I wanted to understand, why is it that rice is coming up so much,
and I understood that millet is losing its demand in the market,
and hence farmers have shifted to rice.
In order to nullify that, or negate that, I wanted to create a market for millet,
and my solution was edible cutlery.
I made these spoons which you just saw me eating,
I made chopsticks, I made soup spoons, I made a whole lot of stuff,
everything that can be used to lift food into mouth.
You can have your coffee stirrers, you can have your forks,
you can have anything that you need to lift food into your mouth.
And these are made of millet.
The beauty about millet is they are complex carbohydrates,
so they do not turn soggy very soon.
Even when put in hot liquids, hot water,
they don't turn soggy, they don't fall off.
And another beauty about this is that we do not use any preservatives,
any chemicals, they're one hundred percent natural flours, kneaded with water,
shaped and baked.
Then we got adventurous.
We thought, hey, this is flour, why can't I make it more exciting?
So I added salt and pepper. That is what I ate.
You can add sugar, and you got sweet spoons.
You add vanilla, you got a vanilla spoon.
You add lemon on it, and you got a lemon spoon.
And you got ginger or cinnamon;
ginger-garlic, and I started getting too adventurous.
Suddenly, I can imagine wearing a chef cap.
It is coming out more tasty, and I don't add any fat in it.
And it is very healthy.
So every which way, we come out with a product that's very good.
And I didn't stop there.
This is how the package looks.
Earlier, I was packing it in plastic shrink films,
but I was always feeling guilty for using plastic
because my motive was anti-plastic.
And then packing it in plastic was something I didn't really enjoy.
Then I came across a paper which is heat sealable,
does not have any plastic lamination inside -
the lamination is potato starch -
and using that, we are able to create packaging that is biodegradable
and heat sealable nevertheless.
That way we have come out with our product that is extremely environment friendly.
Having said so much, am I able to achieve my mission
of creating a market, creating a demand for millet? No.
I have to clearly understand the market better.
I understood that in the market,
you and I are not the people who are going to buy cutlery in bulk.
It is being purchased by the caterers.
To them, cutlery is just an input,
and as any typical business is,
they will look at input costs as low as possible.
So, if you can see the history of it, you first had the steel spoons,
and then the cost of replacing lost, misplaced or stolen spoons was high.
In response to that came the aluminum cutlery.
And then, even that was a little on the high side,
and then came the mid-80s, the plastic spoon, and friends,
the entire aluminum cutlery manufacturing industry got wiped out.
But, we all hate plastic, that's why it's in the black background.
We don't want plastic; we hate it.
And then came bioplastic.
Bioplastic still has not made any impact in the market
because it is still expensive.
So as you can see, the price of bioplastic is higher than the plastic.
And the new kid on the block, we, have come out with a product
which is as cheap as plastic.
We don't need to suffer plastic any more.
And in the process, I'm hitting two birds with one stone.
On one hand, I'm able to get groundwater preservation.
And on the other hand, I'm coming out with an alternative to disposable cutlery.
We don't need to suffer plastic any further.
The market initially had given me a lot of challenges.
To begin with, challenge number one, is the product itself.
When I was going to people and saying, "Hey, you can eat up a spoon,"
he says, "Hey, what are you talking? Are you crazy, man?"
Nobody believed me that you can eat up a spoon.
When I tell them that this is a spoon that contains no chemicals,
no preservatives, nothing.
It is one hundred percent natural, organic-
natural product, not organic product,
one hundred percent natural product, people were never believing me.
And it's only over a period of time and sustained efforts
and then through social media that today I'm having a huge market.
Today, in a span of one month, more than $385,000 of pre-paid orders
have already been received.
That is the kind of market response we got from all over the world -
Swaziland to Iceland. Oh boy.
I certainly started getting back to my atlas
to understand which country's where.
(Laughter)
The second one is the product testing,
and at the product testing, I had the people who initially doubted me,
who were very skeptical, started really loving it.
I'm sure you also will be once you get your hands on a spoon.
And the market is immense and it is emerging.
So, I hope through this talk of mine,
I would be able to remove 120 billion-
that is my target for the next three years.
I am planning to remove 120 billion plastic cutlery
weighing about 1.2 million tons of plastic from getting added into the garbage.
I want, through this talk of mine, to send a message
that to solve complex problems there are very simple solutions,
and one such simple solution is a spoon you can eat
and not throw away,
and if you do want to throw away, don't worry,
within two days it degenerates.
That is provided the stray animals don't eat it up sooner.
Thank you.
(Cheers)
(Applause)