Art can kill you, if you aren’t a panda
Zhao Bandi (above) had it right… art can be dangerous business.
It all started when I had the idea of making my own bamboo fabric. Bamboo fabric is one of the most mysterious eco-fabrics recently invented as a magically eco-licious large-scale industrial product for sale to environmentally conscious yoga moms. The bamboo is grown in organic, super-productive groves in Southeast Asia, harvested… something happens… and then it’s this amazing fabric that saves the planet, wicks away your yoga-sweat, won’t trigger little Isadore or Cyrus’s wool/hemp allergy, and so on. Great stuff! I myself have some 80% bamboo viscose, 20% wool leggings that are THE BOMB and only rarely leave my body from November to March.
But, the fiber nerd wants to know, how it is made? Can I turn the stand of bamboo culms (great Scrabble word, btw) that is rapidly devouring my back yard into some crunchy hot-shorts? I’m sure it’s not even the right kind of bamboo, but if I could make it work I would have some rad shorts, and also probably a MacArthur Genius Grant. Plus, the northwest corner of the yard, to grow tomatoes in.
This is what my backyard looks like. Yes, that’s me.
According to the internet, there are two ways of processing bamboo into fabric. One method involves lots of caustic chemicals that are probably dumped into panda watering-holes. The other method is so slow and tedious and mechanical that the internet could hardly be bothered to tell you about it. There are some great poorly-translated descriptions like this one: “In automatic processing, a woody tools of a bamboo plant have been dejected as well as a healthy enzymes have been used to furnish a tear-jerking mass where fibers have been combed out as well as spun in to a yarn.”
What the internet (thanks, ehow!) was willing to say about the potentially domestic, mechanical method of processing bamboo is as follows:
1. Crush the bamboo between heavy rocks or between two plywood boards clamped together.
2. Put the crushed bamboo into a container and add water and natural enzymes. Allow this mixture to sit until the bamboo becomes soft and turns into a pulp-like substance. Drain the bamboo and let it dry.
3. Cut the bamboo fibers into smaller pieces and put them in a vat that’s pressurized and contains water and amine oxide, a mild, nontoxic solvent. Heat the mixture and allow it to stay in the container until the bamboo fibers dissolve.
…Then do some more magical things involving spinnerets and amine oxide, which looks like a chemical that actually won’t kill you on contact. What really caught my interest, however, were the first two steps. If you hadn’t figured this out already, the first two steps are usually my favorite part of any complicated process… and often as far as I get. But look! Grinding and subjecting bamboo to enzymes is what pandas do when they eat it! Wouldn’t it be funny if I could chew up a bunch of bamboo and then let the chewed pulp sit around until it broke down the fibers into usable mush? Isn’t this exactly how they make the Peruvian corn- or cassava-based beer, chicha?
Yes, yes it is. Wikipedia says; “Traditionally, the chicha is prepared from cassava root by women, using a very simple method. Pieces of washed, peeled root are thoroughly chewed in the mouth, and the resulting juice is spat into a bowl. The fibrous mass that remains in the mouth is used elsewhere.” WHERE? Damn you, ‘citation needed.’ I am so, so curious.
Anyhow, I started chewing on some of the bamboo just out of curiousity, but it doesn’t taste so great. It was fortunate that I looked it up, because it turns out this stuff is rather poisonous when raw. According to one of the more alarmist treatments of the subject (http://www.helium.com/items/1181289-edible-bamboo), “because they are high in cyanide eating raw Bamboo can cause severe intestinal pain, dysentery and even death. It is said during times of war they [the author means, ‘The Orientals’] used to feed unprepared Bamboo to their prisoners of war and then laughed at them as they writhed in pain and often died horrible deaths.” Wow, how cool/racist. Tomorrow I’ll try parboiling the stuff, but for now I should probably go to bed before I get any more good ideas.
