Flat Box

ALBANY, N.Y. - What will it take to get cups and bowls back onto American hiking trails?

Utensils and silverware have been under attack in the hiking world for some time now. While Thoreau traveled to Walden Pond with a set of knives and stew pot, experts today recommend the long distance hiker travel with just a metal bowl. Minimalists eat freeze dried food and drink coffee out of the same bowl.

While the few ounces might help on day six of a week-long trek through the Rockies, it makes the trip a less uncivilized. Enter Orkiaso, the flat plastic sheets that fold into leak-proof cups, bowls and plates within a minute.

I first saw these at Eastern Mountain Sports, where I'm putting in a few extra shifts for the holidays (Holidays to Russia don't fund themselves). EMS is giving the item a large display in the campware section of the store.



This clever innovation comes not from the land of the tatami but fussy old England. Three recent university grads took spacial-visual skills and a clever marketing strategy and turned it into one of the year's hottest inventions. It's now available - according to the product's Web site - on six continents, although who exactly in Africa is begging for flat bowls for hiking trips I'm not sure.

You won't find it mentioned on their Web site, butorkiaso means "folded plastic" in Japanese, and is a form of origami. It can't be considered true origami, because the sheets used to make the items have been cut into non-square shapes. But this invention shows that the one or two days devoted to teaching American children how to make a paper sailboat (or if you're lucky enough to have a Japanese exchange student, a crane) might not be a complete waste of time.

(On the subject of Eastern folding traditions, I wanted to point out that the Russian nesting doll, or matrioshka, isn't really Russian. The first ones of these dolls-within-dolls that every person brings back from Moscow were made in 1891, as a copy of an older Japanese style. The Japanese dolls in turn evolved from Chinese Boxes, the fount of thing-inside-a-smaller-thing worldwide.)

Orkiaso is manufactured in Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. This means that it took Brits, Russians, and Japanese to modify a Chinese invention, which is now made in China and sold to Americans and Africans at inflated prices. Imperialism is not dead.