Rice.

Let me preface this by stating that I have nothing against chop sticks.

Nothing at all... But... Lets face, its really hard to get those last couple grains of rice out of the bottom of the bowl. Man... if you ate with a spoon you could grab those last 15 grains of rice in the bowl. So naturally this idea came to mind, so I decided to run some numbers --

#1. According to http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-27637-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html

a grain of rice weights in at .28 grams

#2 we can assume there are 15 grams of rice left over in an empty bowl.

#3 we can assume people eat three meals a day.

#4 We can assume half of the world eats rice everyday (this means that if someone in africa eats rice today, then someone in china can have noodles, so I think it evens out).

Lets run the numbers!

.28 grams x 15 grains = 4.2 grams

4.2 grams x 3 meals a day = 12.6 grams per day

12.6 grams x 3 billion meals per day = 37.8 billion grams

37.8 billion x 365 days = 13,797 billion grams a year

13.8 billion kg a year.

From what I could gather... a 20 kg bag of rice is going for about $20 on average around the world. That means a $1 a kg... which means that the global price is about 13.8 billion dollars a year. That is slightly more than the GDP of Bolivia, or about a billion more than Uruguay, Turkmenistan, and Honduras.T

Lol, economics is so fun! And thats just rice at the bottom of a bowl. I haven't even started thinking about the effect of disposable chopsticks.

Thanks,

Guthrie