photo(trope)isms...: bioplastics bemoaned...

I ate lunch today at one of the "green" government cafeterias near my new office building. The scene resembled an overcrowded high school lunchroom. The faces floating around me were a panoply of extremes, overdressed and under-starched youths mingling with over-starched underwhelmed politicos. The pizza bar offered an array of glistening square cuts. I chose the cheese, one slice. After paying for the reflective polygon, I grabbed a set of flatware. The feel was different, the sheen was absent. These were forks and knives made of corn starch, mostly...a hard resin billed as "biodegradable and biocompostable."

The knife flexed sideways as I tried to slice my cheese pizza. My new eco-sci-fi cutlery eased through the cheese, but barely dented the dough. I ate the pizza with my hands, and then gave the knife and fork a closer look. Bending either of them generated stretch marks, of sorts. The lines vanished after gently straightening the utensil.

The flatware's design was less than inspiring, a design element constrained by its own nomenclature...any semblance of artfulness unnecessarily eclipsed by a paean to eco-pragmatism. I finished eating, and retired the cutlery to the "biocompostables" bin. Walking past the main stand, I grabbed a fresh trio of flatware...souveniers from my close encounter with the eco-chic. Hours later, I wondered how much corn or cornstarch was needed to make a bioplastic spoon, or fork, or knife. I wondered if this maize product was a bit of high-fructose hyperbole for an emergent hyper-environmental consciousness.

This evening, I found an article in Popular Science, The Problem with (Bio)Plastic, by Matt Ransford, dated May, 7, 2008. His text warned of the eco-woes and hinted that bioplastics may be just as harmful as petro-plastics. The assessment was sobering, but artfully critical. I mean literally artful, replete with echoes of René Magritte and his modernist playfulness...of his dissonant aesthetic. I'll spare you the article's fatalism and will neglect to paraphrase the warnings against this particular panacea. But, I have to share that image, the presumptive tribute to Magritte, his Modernist eye, and critical sense of irony.