Eat the green toothpicks at Korean restaurants

I must have been living under a rock, because I just discovered this bizarre fact and feel disgusted by it. But it's true: you can eat the green toothpicks that are often present at the cashier counter at restaurants in Korea.

All my time here, I had just lazily assumed that these toothpicks were made of plastic. I've used them several times, and they feel like plastic. They look like plastic. I just assumed mass producing cheap plastic toothpicks would be somehow cheaper than wooden toothpicks that are more common in Western countries.

But they're actually made of starch!

Specifically, this product ordering site shows that their main ingredient is sweet potato starch. These have just 3 ingredients:

sweet potato starch
D-Sorbitol (a sugar alcohol used commonly as a sugar substitute)
food coloring
other "minor" ingredients (slightly suspicious but probably just some kind of stabilizers?)

Sounds delicious.

Which leads to mukbang type videos where people literally boil a whole pack of them in water, and they turn to something like noodles, and then they eat them.

This young man shows us that after boiling them for a good 10 minutes or so, they become basically 당면 - cellophane noodles or "glass" noodles which you're probably familiar with from the common Korean food Chapchae/Japchae.

He eats the entire pot. Disgusting, if I think about it superficially. But really, what's the harm to your health? He claims they're not bad, and actually tasty in a way, though I will just guess they must be pretty plain. And if they are obviously biodegradable, what's the harm for the Earth in using them?

Turns out the products that I blindly assumed were cheap plastic trash are actually eco-friendly and even edible. Can't get much more progressive than that! So next time you see them, grab one and go green, literally!

Here's the whole video by creator StimBoy(스팀보이):

"녹말 이쑤시개 끓여먹기" - YouTube