Tropical Packaging Solutions
Organic… Biodegradable… Locally derived without the use of vehicles… Low cost… Hand-made… Practical… Beautiful… Open source… Disposable…
Refreshingly, most places in Vanuatu are coming into an awareness about the harmfulness of modern packing before they have lost the habit of their traditional solutions.
Coconut palm leaves are used to weave many different designs of baskets for small and large quantities. They are often re-used, but are considered quick enough to make that they are disposable. When the leaves dry and the basket goes brown in colour it is still good for a considerable time. We use them on the boat for storing our shoes, for instance, as well as vegetables. Here are large nuts, sweet potatoes, yam, and other root vegetables for sale by the basket, ready to carry away with ease.
And here, yam, manioc and other root veg, with husked coconuts for sale by the string alongside.
This has got to be the ultimate packaged soft drink! Coconuts are extremely healthy, delicious and refreshing, all you need to do is open the coconut.
This can be easier said than done if you don’t know how, and there is more than one way to do it. Locals live with a machete in their hands, are very capable with knives in general and with a few swipes of a blade will de-husk a nut (as seen above). This is the saleable drinking coconut which is still closed and will keep (in our fridge, for instance, for three weeks or so). To open it all you need to do is cut away the top pointy matter to expose the three ‘eyes’ of the coconut then find which eye is soft and cut a small hole through with the point of a knife or other tool, then stick a straw in and enjoy. (Yes, we have stainless steel straws for this purpose.) Without a straw you can simply suck the coconut water out, so there is no problem about being caught short without a straw. A second common solution to preparing a coconut for drinking immediately is to leave the husk on and open it at the other (non-’eye’) end where the nut is thinner and can be cut open using a machete to a much wider aperture for drinking more like a cup. And after you’ve finished the drink, just throw it away… anywhere where no-one will trip over it! Mine go over the side of the boat into the ocean after dinner most days.
Leaves are used for wrapping things, in this case I think this is a taro leaf, and it is wrapping a quantity of fern leaf (for cooking as a green).
The taro leaf is not edible to the best of my knowledge, but the tuber than it grows from is, so this packaging is a bi-product of growing the taro which is widely used. It is tied with vine. Different vines from the forest (which surrounds and encroaches upon most gardens, note) have different properties, some are strong, some are more flexible, but all seem to be used in a split form, as here. I have seen vine about 15m long split with one cut to the end, then the simple act of pulling it neatly apart all the way down in one sweep. Different vines thus prepared are not only used for packaging though. Ni-Vans use it to lash the outriggers on their canoes and in various aspects of house construction, as well as many other established and ad hoc applications.
Lettuce is not a traditional vegetable, but reasonably popular. Without bags to present them on the market stall, the handy gardeners cut an 2-3cm section of the main mid-rib of a palm leaf around a leaflet, strip away the green part from the leaflet just leaving the mid-rib, then skewer the lettuce along the rib in whatever numbers works for their sales. Easy to carry away and easy to remove, the spacing of the lettuce plants along the rib also offers them some protection during carrying.
Not one for the faint-hearted! Here are bunches of live crabs tied together with vine on sale.
These are some kind citrus fruit. You do not buy anything by weight in Vanuatu, you buy by quantity, which is determined by the seller. With these citrus fruit a saleable quantity of fruit is picked from the tree with a long-ish stem still on each one, then lashed by this stem to a stick using split vine. You pick it up by the stick. Such a sturdy and an effective way of carrying citrus.
These are nangai (nuts) from the nangai tree, a traditional native food and a very delicious one. The best way to eat nangai is straight out of the shell, broken open with a rock or hammer, and popped into your mouth. Saving that, they are often for sale skewered on palm-leaf mid-ribs like this, cooked or raw. Because I bought several sticks of nangai here, they are further packaged for taking away by having a banana leaf wrapped around them (seen here open).
Why stint on bananas?! Banana leaves are used for all kinds of things, packing among them, and an impromptu disposable plate another, but the leaves are only the useful bi-product of the fruit itself. Bananas come in many different sizes, shapes, textures and flavours, some for eating raw and others for cooking. It is common to buy a ‘hand’ of bananas, but the most effective way to carry home bananas is in a bunch like this, which not only is easy to carry home without bruising the fruits, but can be hung up somewhere by the stalk. This one is a bunch of big, green cooking bananas.
For those who cannot be bothered to go and pick their own banana leaves for packaging their produce (or whatever else), leaves are on sale in bundles.
To the right of the banana leaves you can see bunches of sprouting coconuts tied together by their sprouting shoots with vine. When opened, these navara are not the coconut you are used to from the supermarket at all. After the nut grows a decent early shoot, the interior of the nut changes nature, the hollow interior now filled with a light and fluffy coconut-flavoured yumminess!
Of course, ni-Vans use what is in their environment to package the produce which also grows in their environment, and none of these packaging solutions are practicable or obvious in a northern hemisphere temperate country, for instance, but the inventive use of bi-products of food production and of other materials available in the wild or in gardens presents brilliant inspiration for a new way to think about packaging, finding local solutions in our own local environment.
Click on the gallery below for larger versions of the photos:
