Have your fill - and then the plate, fork and spoon

TORONTO - Soon, you can eat your plate and cutlery after finishing your food.

A professor at Canada’s Montreal University claims she is about to design plates and cutlery that can be eaten after the food is finished.

Diane Bisson of the university’s School of Industrial Design says her plates will be tasty as well as stylish.

Before she designs edible plates, Diane has tested 50 recipes and 400 prototypes of these plates and put her research in a book called “Edible, The Food as Material”.

“Corn-based and potato-based comestible plates do exist, but they are designed to be biodegradable rather than eaten,” Bisson said in a university statement Monday.

“They have had no market success because they look like cardboard and are not appetising in the least bit.”

To give shape to her idea, she said she worked with top chefs and dieticians from her province.

“We began by exploring the technical, mechanical, chemical and colour properties of foods which provide both the challenges and the key to the eventual object.”

She said she ruled out preservatives, artificial colours and sugar as ingredients in her edible plates as she wanted her product to be “in tune with today’s social and environmental conscience”.

Bisson also researched leguminous flours, fruit pastes and juices to create crunchy, chewy and gelatinous textures in the planned plates.

Finally, a lot of trial and error led to satisfactory results, she said.

The Canadian professor said she now plans to work with a gourmet caterer to design a five-course meal in which all the dishware and cutlery will be edible.

After this, she will focus on edible plates and cutlery that will be accessible to the general public.