VANCOUVER TRENDZ [THURSDAY]

Wood-y Good-y

February 21, 2008

Picnic season is right around the corner (see the crocuses popping up along the fences?) and your dreams of munching on potato salad and drinking beer by the sea are about to burst into fruition.

But then this small black cloud floats through your head: it’s that darn cutlery you have to wash once you get home. Cutlery that will, despite meticulous licking, have bits of dried mayo and egg on it, requiring you to bust out the steel wool.

Aspenware, a company out of Vernon with an eye to sustainability, hates taking stainless steel to picnics, too, so they’ve devised a line of single-use wooden utensils that a) look damn stylish and b) are compostable. Called “WÜN” (pronounced “one”), the forks, knives and spoons are made with aspen and birch trees cut down on a small scale.

Now, while your treehuggers won’t be thrilled about trees being axed for any purpose, WÜN-ware sure beats plastic take-out cutlery, doesn’t it? And just because it’s disposable doesn’t mean you can’t use it a bunch of times before it hits the compost heap. So there!

Dig in at Capers, 1675 Robson Street. and Choices, 1202 Richards Street, or visit  www.aspenware.ca.

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