Can we please stop with those wooden spoons?
Don’t get me wrong, sustainability is genuinely important to me, and yes, we collectively use far too much plastic. It’s great that something is being done about that. But please, as far as I’m concerned, the solution does NOT lie in wooden spoons. Because they really do ruin every food they touch.
And yet I see them popping up everywhere by now. At ice cream parlors, with smoothie bowls, at Schiphol—even at McDonald’s when you order a McFlurry: you get a wooden spoon with it. And then it no longer tastes right. Or rather, it doesn’t taste the way you want your McFlurry to taste.
Everything tastes like wood
Het Parool wrote about this before, after wooden spoons were introduced with the McFlurry. All of Twitter was up in arms, because the entire ice cream no longer tasted the same. And that can genuinely be true, said Garmt Dijkhuis (a researcher into the experience of eating at Wageningen University). The material of your cutlery can indeed influence your entire taste experience.
And according to him, that’s because all your senses are stimulated when you’re eating. And a wooden spoon’s rough surface (has anyone ever gotten a splinter from one?) generally isn’t experienced as particularly pleasant either. He doesn’t mention the fact that the woody taste is transferred too, as I experience it.
Steel spoons
As far as I’m concerned, every business could take an example from Van Swoll ice cream parlor in Apeldoorn, which now provides stainless steel spoons with its ice cream. Once you’ve finished your ice cream, you simply put the spoon in a container and they wash it again. Now that’s sustainable. My favorite soup shop also has a good alternative: you can buy your own spoon here for two euros (and it isn’t made of wood). All good alternatives—and then your ice cream, soup, salad—whatever you order—will actually taste good too. Because if you’re going to eat it with one of those wooden spoons, you might as well throw it away immediately or simply not order it at all. Such a shame.
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