I Like My Chocolate with a Side of Plant

Share

New year, new decade, new times – makes us want to have new selves. Again I return to my friend Ambrose Bierce, who affirms that there is in fact nothing new under the sun, but there are plenty of old things we don’t know about yet. And by old things I mean, like, things that I didn’t know about until today. Old thing? Roll Out Flowers. It’s things like that which made me cut off DirecTV, and though I have somewhat socially stunted my growth in doing so, I don’t ever have to think about “Roll Out Flowers” again. Oh wait, but I just did. What brought me back to this perversion of nature?

It was seeing the concept of “Roll Out Flowers” done right.

A very small company on foodzie.com, TerraSource Gourmet Chocolates, makes mostly-gluten-free fairly-traded vegan dark chocolates made with local ingredients. But did you notice? They don’t bandy around the word “organic” like everyone else. I like that. I also like vegan dark chocolate, but what really made me take notice was this: “Packaging is another aspect that has a huge impact in terms of green practices. Our most unique offering is a two-piece favor box made of plantable paper embedded with native prairie seeds or a mix of wildflowers.”

This is new to me! But not new. I Googled “plantable paper history” and got 12,000 results, so yup, I just discovered something old. But how old? A bit more oogling and Googling produced nothing on the actual history of this practice, so I went to my most loved/hated source, Yahoo! Answers, to ask random people on the interwebs who would probably yell at me because the computer screen protects all. A guy named Ishtar suggested that paper was too rare and expensive until recently to engage in this practice. Sounds plausible, but I think more research is needed, perhaps a trip to my local top-tier college library? Not sure if it’s worth more or less than the 5 Yahoo points I sacrificed to ask that question.

You’ve got packaging; it needs to be recycled. Travel out the door in a green box and onto the truck to the paper recycling plant, where it goes through processes unknown to me and soon becomes a new product, which goes on a different truck back to a different store where somebody buys it and the cycle begins again. How much freaking fossil fuel does that process use?!?! I’m not saying “don’t recycle,” I’m saying “reuse first.” Would I pay a little bit more for paper packaging that comes embedded with seeds? Yes. I would throw that sucker in the ground and the buck stops here, man. “Roll Out Flowers” is chemical and wasteful, and doesn’t even work based on the reviews I read. But “plantable paper” is going on my “neat things list.” But wait – don’t I kill all plant life that I touch, seed format or not? Yes, yes I do. So I would give it to my daughter’s green-thumbed teachers and spread joy and happiness to the children. The chocolate, however, is all mine.

Related posts:

1. Sociology with a Side of Eggs
2. Chocolate Couture Stirs the Pot, But Not Much

About the Author

Kristine Empire is a narcissistic freelance writer in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She likes vintage clothes, kills every plant she touches, has a phobia of grocery stores, enjoys getting shout-outs on college radio, and her favorite city in the world is Prague.

E-mail the author | Read more posts by KristineEmpire