Woodsen ad: What an 81-Year-Old Elder Taught My Students

Three weeks ago, 38 high school juniors put every spoon in their families' kitchens in jars of hot water overnight. By Monday morning, eleven of the jars on my classroom windowsill had turned brown. One of them was mine. I have taught American history at the same small Christian college prep school for 27 years. Every fall, I take the junior class on the same field trip, and every year I think I know exactly how it's going to go. This year, I didn't. Three weeks ago, I loaded 38 juniors and four parent chaperones onto a bus and drove three hours to a reservation we've visited every fall for over a decade. The cultural center, the museum, a walk with one of the tribal historians. Then lunch in the community center, cooked by the elders. The cook is always Ms. Loretta. She's 81. She has fed our school every fall for fifteen years, and she runs that kitchen like a drill sergeant who loves you. I teach history, so I know Thanksgiving is more complicated on a reservation than it is at my table. But Ms. Loretta fed forty strangers that day like we were her own grandkids. Soup with corn, beans and squash, in a pot the size of a washtub. One of our chaperones, a very nice dad, wanted to help. He'd brought a bag of serving utensils from our school kitchen. He took out a black plastic ladle and reached for her pot. Ms. Loretta caught his wrist before it got there. "Not in my soup." The whole room went quiet. Thirty-eight teenagers, and not one of them was looking at a phone. She took the ladle from him, held it up so the kids could see it, and said, "You came here to learn something. I'll teach you something your textbooks won't." Then she took the rest of the utensils out of his bag, one at a time. The black plastic ladle: "That's oil from the ground, shaped like a spoon. Put it in a hot pot and scrape, and it comes off. Into the soup. You just can't see it." A red silicone spatula: "Soft plastic is still plastic. Get it hot enough and it sweats. No smell, no taste, so nobody worries about it." A bamboo spoon: "Bamboo isn't wood. It's grass. You can't make grass into a spoon without gluing it together. Ask what's in the glue." And a shiny wooden spoon from a store: "That one's coated. Hot water and dish soap take the coating off. Into the food." Then she went back to stirring with her own ladle. Plain, pale wood, worn down on one side. Her grandfather carved it from a maple burl before she was born. "Here's your homework," she said. "Tonight, put every spoon in your mother's kitchen in its own jar of hot water. Leave them overnight. The wood will tell on itself by morning. The plastic won't tell you anything. That's worse." Caleb, who sits in the back row of my third period and has never once asked a question in my class, raised his hand. "Where do we get one like yours?" She laughed. "You don't. My grandfather's been gone fifty years." Then she said, "If you can't carve your own, you buy one piece of honest wood with nothing on it. Most of what's in the stores is coated. My granddaughter found a small company called Woodsen and bought me a set for my birthday. Small-leaf acacia. One piece. Nothing on it." She tapped the ladle on the pot. "It's not ours. We didn't make it. But it's honest wood, and it passed my jar." Abigail, front row, raised her hand. "Acacia? Like the Ark?" Ms. Loretta looked at me over her glasses. "What are you teaching these kids?" "Exodus," I said. Abigail recited it from memory, because our students memorize scripture every week. Exodus 25:10. "And they shall make an ark of shittim wood." Shittim is acacia. Ms. Loretta nodded. "Then you already know it's good wood." I assumed the homework would last until the bus ride home. On Monday morning, there were 38 mason jars lined up on my classroom windowsill. Every single kid did it. Some of them brought two jars. One girl brought five, because her family had five kinds of spatulas and she wanted a fair trial. Eleven of the jars were brown. Every one of the brown ones had a store-bought wooden spoon in it. The bamboo jars were cloudy, like dishwater. And the plastic and the silicone jars were clear. Every one. "The plastic won't tell you anything. That's worse." Mr. Hollis, our chemistry teacher, wandered in to see what all the jars were about and stayed through two class periods. By Wednesday he'd made it a lab. He had the kids look up the research themselves. Microplastics have been found in human blood. A 2024 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found them in the plaque inside people's arteries. Mr. Hollis made a point of telling them scientists are still working out what all of it does in the body. But heat making plastic shed isn't up for debate. "BPA-free" usually just means they swapped in a cousin of BPA. Silicone gives off chemicals called siloxanes once it gets hot enough. A lot of the glue that holds bamboo together is made with formaldehyde. And that shiny finish on cheap wood is a coating. At the end of the lab, Caleb said, "So she was right about all four." I'll tell you which jar I was most embarrassed by. Mine. I did the homework too. The brown jar on the end of the windowsill held the wooden spoon I've stirred my grandmother's cornbread dressing with for twenty Thanksgivings. Twenty years of dressing, gravy and cranberry sauce. Twenty-two people at my table every year. That night, I looked up the company Ms. Loretta named. Woodsen. Small-leaf acacia, the same family as the wood in Exodus. Every piece is one solid piece of wood. No glue. No coatings. Third-party lab tested to FDA food contact standards. And a lifetime warranty: if a piece ever cracks, they replace it. They were running a Thanksgiving sale. The seven-piece set was $99. I ordered one that night. When it came, I did Ms. Loretta's homework one more time, right there on the windowsill. One Woodsen spoon in a jar of hot water, next to my brown jar. The next morning it was clear. Three of my juniors came in before first period just to check. By Friday I had emails from nine parents. One mom wrote, "My son made me throw out my whole drawer. I'm not sure whether to thank you or not." Another sent a picture of her new set with a single line: "Thank Ms. Loretta for us." My mother-in-law asked why I'd thrown out "perfectly good spoons." I put my brown jar on her kitchen counter. She hasn't asked again. She's getting a set for Thanksgiving. So is my sister. And so are the two teachers in our lounge who keep borrowing mine. This Thanksgiving, twenty-two people will sit down at my table. My husband will read the same verse he reads every year, Psalm 107:1. "O give thanks unto the LORD, for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever." And for the first time in twenty years, nothing plastic will touch the gravy. Here's why I'm writing this now, and not after Thanksgiving. Woodsen's Thanksgiving sale is still on, and the seven-piece set is still $99. But they make their sets in small batches. When I went back this morning to order two more, the page said most of this batch was already gone. And the sale price is ending. Once the Thanksgiving sale is over, the price goes up. With Christmas right behind it, I don't expect it to come back down. If you're hosting this year, cook with it. If you're a guest, bring it. It's the best hostess gift I know of, because everybody cooks, nobody thinks about their spoons, and it's the one gift they'll use every single day. And if you're a parent wondering what to get your kid's teacher for Christmas, I'm not saying. I'm just saying. P.S. Here's the exact set I bought. The Thanksgiving sale was still on when I checked. https://woodsen.co/pages/ac2 P.P.S. Ms. Loretta's homework is still the best assignment I've ever seen. Put every spoon in your kitchen in its own jar of hot water tonight. The wood will tell on itself by morning.