With thanks to Jonathan, actually.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 When I was a kid, in mid 20th c. South Texas,\u00a0 buying, preparing,\u00a0 and consuming food provided\u00a0 much less waste than it does today.\u00a0\u00a0 Vegetables in the grocery store were not encased in plastic bags.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Milk and cream\u00a0 weredelivered in glass bottles which the milk company picked up at the time of the next delivery.\u00a0\u00a0 Depending on the grocery, bread might be in a wrapper, or might be “nekkid.”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Meat was wrapped in butcher paper, true, for its travel homeward, but there was no little plastic try and clingfilm wrap over it.\u00a0\u00a0 Grocery sacks were heavy brown paper, widely used (by us as well) as containers to line trash containers in the house–containers that almost never overflowed the modest size they were back then.\u00a0\u00a0 They were also used as drawing paper for kids, as costume elements,\u00a0 as mulch in the garden,\u00a0 as something to put on a patch of mud in the yard to keep it off shoes,\u00a0 as an extra bedside trash container for used tissues when someone had a juicy cold, and so on.\u00a0\u00a0 Flour\u00a0 in small amounts came in a paper bag, as did sugar, but flour in 20 pound and more amounts came in cloth bags, and the cloth was brightly printed cotton–easy to turn into clothing, curtains, quilts, whatever.\u00a0\u00a0 (My mother made my clothes, but refused to make me a “flour sack” dress, claiming we never needed that much flour at a time and the flour beetles would get into it.)\u00a0\u00a0 Paper wrappings were biodegradable–if buried, they decayed readily.\u00a0\u00a0 The few foods in jars and tin cans resulted in useful containers for later use, as did the aluminum foil frozen food “dishes.”\u00a0\u00a0 As for the food itself,\u00a0 we ate it at one meal after another (if there was enough for leftovers)\u00a0 and when it was down to the end, we had dogs, cats, and a parakeet.\u00a0 Scraps went to animals.<\/p>\n
These days if I buy onions or potatoes I also get a plastic mesh or plastic sack that has to be cut to get at the vegetables, so it’s not reusable.\u00a0\u00a0 There’s a plastic sack around each bunch of celery,\u00a0 a plastic sack (sealed) of radishes,\u00a0 a plastic sack of carrots.\u00a0 Mushroooms are in a little plastic tub with shrink-wrap over it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Even where produce is laid out in bins, the shopper must put it in a plastic bag, weigh it, and stick a bar-code tag (extruded by the weighing machine) on the plastic sack to make checkout quicker.\u00a0\u00a0 Most things are in multiple layers of packaging, and the packaging is not, on the whole recyclable…and it’s bulky and quickly fills up a trash container of the size that used to last us all week.\u00a0\u00a0 We don’t have a dog and our cat is old and eats less.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Milk comes in plastic jugs (which does nothing good for the flavor, compared to the glass bottles it used to come in!)\u00a0 and the jugs are not returnable (or recyclable if you live in a town without recycling, where the nearest recycling center wants only glass or aluminum cans.)<\/p>\n
And that’s just food.\u00a0\u00a0 In the hardware store where I spent a lot of hours, wrapping was minimal.\u00a0\u00a0 If you bought a pound of sixpenny nails, you got it in a heavy-duty paper sack.\u00a0\u00a0 If you bought a lot of nails, you would buy the box (wooden, stout, suitable for making something from) the nails arrived from the wholesaler in.\u00a0\u00a0 You could look at, and touch,\u00a0 the nuts, bolts, screws, nails, brads. \u00a0 If you bought a hammer or wrench or screwdriver,\u00a0 it wasn’t hanging on a rack backed in plasticized cardboard with a heavy plastic blister over it…it was hanging on a rack, and you picked it up, took it to the cash register, paid for it, and walked out with it.\u00a0 None of the tools were normally wrapped after purchase; none were packaged before hand.\u00a0\u00a0 Small items were arranged in open compartments (divided by pieces of glass or wood that fit into slots) that it was my job to keep neat looking.\u00a0 (I had to be taught not to scold customers who left the fishing lures in a tangle.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Now, bringing home tools or enough nails or screws for a project means having a pile of bubble tops and cardboard to deal with.\u00a0 Things have to be cut open, and once cut the containers are useless for any other purpose.\u00a0\u00a0 You can’t touch or smell the metal before you buy it (which is how you find out for sure what the quality it.)<\/p>\n
Our world is a world of waste.\u00a0\u00a0 Even sixty years ago, it wasn’t nearly as bad.\u00a0 In my mother’s childhood, waste in small towns and rural areas was minimal, and back in time it drifted down toward zero except among the most affluent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With thanks to Jonathan, actually.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 When I was a kid, in mid 20th c. South Texas,\u00a0 buying, preparing,\u00a0 and consuming food provided\u00a0 much less waste than it does today.\u00a0\u00a0 Vegetables in the grocery store were not encased in plastic bags.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Milk and cream\u00a0 weredelivered in glass bottles which the milk company picked up at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[108],"class_list":["post-2302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-background","tag-background"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2302"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2302"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2304,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2302\/revisions\/2304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}