Biospife

Zespri – purveyors of fine kiwifruit since 1997 – created the ‘spife’ a few years ago. It’s like the child you’d get if you mated a spoon and a knife, and continues the tradition of cutlery grafting made popular by the ‘spork’. The real benefit of the spife is that it can be used as an example of a ‘portmanteau’, a combination of two words to create a new one. A good example of a portmanteau also describes the spife – blintriguing.

Not content with grafting part of a knife onto a spoon, the design gurus in the sunny Bay of Plenty have now achieved the culmination of their cutlery cross-breeding with the creation of a bioplastic spife, or a ‘biospife’. It’s fully compostable and made with bioplastic infused with kiwifruit material. Like its cousin, it’s used to both cut and then scoop kiwifruit so that one may consume their inner deliciousness. Why the age-old technique of squeezing the outer skin while holding near your mouth is not adequate is unclear. However, having said all of that, my kids love the spife and were quite clear that they considered it much more important than any of the other inventions in the book, so here it is. I wonder what mixture of eating utensils will come next? The ‘foon’? The ‘knork’? Heaven forbid, the ‘chopstork’?