Cornstarch Packing Peanuts!

I believed that I have reached new levels of utter minutae by blogging about packing peanuts--but hey, hitting new lows was an amusing enough reason to post this.

About a week ago, I tossed a batch of biodegradable cornstarch-based packing peanuts into the compost bin. I went to empty out the kitchen scraps this morning, and saw the remains of the peanuts:


Oh weird--they shrank? They didn't dissolve? I guess things are pretty much a block of frozen kitchen scraps in the bin now... check it out--the same shape, but about the diameter of a pencil:


Fortunately, the intarweb is an incredible font of useless information, written by people with, well, even less of a life than me. One useful clue came from the website for Puffy Stuff--a different biodegradable packing peanut:

Puffy Stuff is an all-natural packing peanut. It has a high density for rugged durability, and won't shrink in humid conditions. Puffy Stuff exceeds wheat starch, corn starch and polystyrene in all labratory tests.

Huh... not corn starch? A quick search of the MSDS revealed that it is PROTEIN BASED LOOSEFILL PACKAGING MATERIAL

So anyway, humidity-based shrinkage makes sense... the humidity under the cover of the compost bin is probably close to 100%.

Anyway, my further searches brought me to a website that briefly recounts the origin of biodegradable packing peanuts:

These cornstarch packing peanuts are the work of food engineer Bill Stoll. He grew up in a small Iowa farming town and attributes his creativity to this upbringing. "Farmers," he recalls, "could fix anything."

In 1992, near the end of his career, Bill Stoll had lunch in a St. Paul restaurant with a client whose company used popcorn for packaging. The owner was looking for a way to pop bigger batches and he wanted to pick Stoll's mind. This question made Stoll recall sounds he'd heard as a kid. In a factory he'd seen cereal being prepared in huge pressure cookers. When the clamp holding the top was knocked away by a sledge hammer, the lid flew open and the grain exploded as if from a cannon. Stoll knew that a similar method is used to make puffed snack food. So he came up with the idea of making something like corn curls for packaging. The result: biodegradable packing peanuts.

Heh. Cool stuff.

Incidentally, based on previous personal research, I can verify that they're pretty flavorless--mostly bland, but with a hint of bitter. However, I keep wondering... hrm... perhaps with a bit of salt, and synethetic orange cheeze powder... perhaps it could be a tasty snack...