The Short Story
We've invented a new utensil. Unlike any other eating utensil, it is a first-order interface between your fingers and food because it allows you to pinch your food just like you do without a utensil while keeping your fingers clean. We need you, your friends, and other smart, good-looking people to help fund a new manufacturing tool for the new design, with new material.
The Longer Story
The Pothole On the
Road to Techville
A few years back,
Dan and I were eating wings and ribs while working on another invention. The
phone in Dan's pocket rang but his fingers were held captive by sauce. He
scrambled to wipe his hands to extract his phone but still managed to drag a
stain onto his pants just after the last ring.
Well, it must have
been the Future calling and we need your help returning the call.
Since that day, we
have worked tirefully (yeah, we're exhausted) to create the utensil that was
missing from civilization: the trong.
The trongs concept feels not like an invention, but a discovery of what other people should have made.
Here are the limitations in other eating utensil : chopsticks pinch food but only at two
points and are tricky to use. The fork, relatively recent technology, is pretty
limited. If you're not using it for balancing meager square-inch bits of food,
then you are skewering a solid chuck of only boneless food in order to
transport it to your mouth.
The ideal utensil for solid foods larger than a few millimeters is the one that works most similarly to the hand(bio-mimicry), while
still providing the benefit of shielding our fingers from the food and vice versa. Right?
We agree and that's
one of the reasons we were awarded US Patent # 8,419,092 (plus international)
and why some folks at the History Channel's Invention USA gave us the thumbs up
and connected us to our prototype injection mold for model 38. We ran trongs parts off
that and were grateful winners in the QVC Sprouts Program, which got us on QVC
thrice, the Today Show twice, BBC/PRI, with many more to come.
Here are some of the practical applications of trongs:
- Eating buffalo wings, shrimp cocktail, barbecue ribs, crudite platters, cheese puffs, and sushi
- Food prep, such as dredging chicken cutlets
- Politely pinching neighboring pizza slices to separate yours from the pie
- Eating hors d'oeuvres at social or professional events and keeping your hands available for shaking
- And most importantly, keeping your fingers free for tickling your tech
The Ask At Hand
All that pumping
out of product has finished off our soft aluminum prototype mold and now we
need a bigger and harder one (insert tasteless joke here). This campaign will hopefully fund a new mold or
molds that will give birth to many millions or billions of the new trongs.
What a profound
thought: unlike the eating fork, which was invented in about 700 A.D. and did not
gain common currency until the 1700's, here we are, from all across the land,
converging around a better way to handle food.
The best measure of
an invention is the product of these criteria:
1. How many people benefit
2. How much they benefit
3. How often they benefit
4. How long will the invention be around
Even though the
trong is definitely low tech and simple, using the above standard, the trong scores
fairly high. Here’s why: regarding how many
people can benefit from this invention, there are more than 7 billion chronic
masticators on this marble-we eat all the dang time. More of these people have a cell phone than access to a
flushable toilet! (http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/03...).
This fact actually speaks to two dimensions of benefit: the prevalence of
high tech, and the need for hygiene. The latter point assumes that a goodly
amount of the 2,500,000 people who do not have a toilet probably lack running
water for ‘post production’ hand washing. You may notice that I demonstrate how
this invention obviates that in the opening scene of the pitch video. No bull.
With variations on
culture/cuisine, I reckon that with regard to how often
people currently touch food with their fingers is pretty high, more than several times daily. How much trongs will help, is a function of how often we
will use our fingers for other things whilst eating-and we all know that our use
of, or dare I say, the appendage-ization of cell phones and other technology to
our bodies is growing at an exponential rate.
The Fingerlarity Is
Here
The full
integration of biology and technology is what von Neumann, Vinge, and Kurzweil, et al refer to as the Singularity
which, at this rate, is not too far off. Even today can you effectively function in this
world without the device on which you are reading these words right now? If
you're like most, probably not. That's not sad. It's true because this
technology provides you great benefit! Like essentially transcending time and
space so you can talk to people out of earshot. Or learn about a totally new type
of eating utensil! An invention that you and lots of other people from all over
the world can help fund so you can get your hands on it, feed your biology and
feel your technology all in one sitting. So back to our criteria of how many,
how much, how often, and how long, and these little finger things are looking
pretty good.
The Environmental
Case-Gotta be crazy not to.
Let's look at the
environmental impact because that's the part of the benefit calculation that is
easily superficialized if considered at all by most. We are looking to raise money here for an injection
mold. An injection mold for plastic!
What a horrible word right? Not. Although we will continue to research material
for a biodegradable trong, the reality is that most trash winds up in landfills,
not composts. In a landfill, there is very little biodegradation. (see http://humanitieslab.stanford.edu/23/174). We
are committed to minimizing any negative environmental effects and even the beta
trongs that we ran off the aluminum prototype mold, and offered in our ship now perks, are made from a reusable
polypropylene plastic. Still, we saw some on-line reviews from people who
thought that those trongs "looked flimsy", the reality is that they
are light and gracile as is required for comfort, but yet are quite durable so that
they can be washed and reused by consumers. And yes, plastic is made from petroleum,
which we pull from the ground, but we don't burn this fossil fuel, and even if
folks eventually throw them away, and the trongs don’t follow the normal
garbage vector to a landfill, then they go back
into the earth as a largely inert food-safe unit. The worst and truly bad case is if they
wind up in our waterways or oceans. In their current form this is unlikely due to the size. Hopefully, people will cherish their trongs
so much, they get appendagized like cell phones did.
What Do We Do With Our Freedom?
If just 1% of the world's population reclaims just 30 seconds every day, that's 5.8 million hours of human productivity! Per Day! The benefit is not
just time and convenience depending on whatever we do with our tech, but paper
napkins and energy used to treat, heat, and pump the water that washes trongless
fingers when we are prepping food in the kitchen or prior to eating. Granted,
we still wash the trong once, at the end of the use event, but that’s twice as
good as washing twice, before and after, or the half a dozen times a home cook
might during a proper dinner prep.
Risks &
Challenges
Let's
be realistic though; we are asking people to change the way they do something
very visceral-eating. We don't have to look that far to see that we humans
don't always quickly adopt a new and better way of doing things. But I
sincerely think this friction is being lubricated by technology, more
specifically the information that we share using technology. We are learning to
learn, to adopt new apps, and ways of doing things. Besides, the singularity is on our side.
Other Ways You Can
Help
Even if you cannot provide funding now, please share with all your friends and everyone else. Keep Calm and Carry Trongs.
Thank You,
Eric Zimmermann, Co-Inventor and believer in a better future.
