Eat your food, and the package too

Published in National Geographic

By Elizabeth Royte

Bowls made of mushrooms. Cups fashioned from seaweed. Designers are creating edible alternatives to plastic. But are we ready to accept them?

Around tables strewn with Exacto knives, bowls, cutting boards, tape, funnels, and bags of hemp powder, mushroom parts, and sugar, a dozen graduate students from the packaging and industrial-design departments at Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, New York, brainstormed.