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The View from My Kitchen

Benvenuti! I hope you enjoy il panorama dalla mia cucina Italiana -- "the view from my Italian kitchen,"-- where I indulge my passion for Italian food and cooking. From here, I share some thoughts and ideas on food, as well as recipes and restaurant reviews, notes on travel, a few garnishes from a lifetime in the entertainment industry, and an occasional rant on life in general..

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Grazie mille!

Thursday, March 12, 2020

So They're Banning Plastic Straws and Bags. So What?


Convenience Does Not Equate To Need

Okay. This is just a rant. Pure and simple. Nothing to do with food, cooking, restaurants, entertainment or anything else usually seen in “The View From My Italian Kitchen.” It's not even an Italian rant. It's just one of those “I'm entitled to my opinion.....and so are you” things. So here goes.

What in the hell is wrong with people today? When did we as a society become so wimpy, whiny, and “needy?” I'm talking specifically about the people who “need” their precious plastic straws, plastic bags, and etc. in order to have a complete and fulfilled life and who will weep, wail, whine, and protest every time somebody moves to ban what they consider to be one of their life's essentials.

PUH-LEEEESE! Not a single damn one of these things is anywhere near “essential.” They are, at best, conveniences. But in the world we've constructed for ourselves in the last fifty years or so, comfort and convenience are king and queen and anything that robs us of those things is abhorrent. It's as if the Founders who alluded to “the pursuit of happiness” and ranked in in importance with life and liberty were actually fomenting for the right to the acquisition of unabashed luxury.

I can't help but notice that the vast majority of these whiners are not old geezers like me. If they were, they would, like me, remember a time when the things they claim to “need” didn't even exist and we all got along without them just fine, thank you very much.

First there was the enormous brouhaha that ensued when plastic straws came under fire. OMG, you'd have thought that King Herod, in the guise of Uncle Sam, was going door to door seeking first-born sons! Somehow, when I wasn't looking, plastic straws became not only a convenience but some perverse form of entitlement and a necessity of life. Something without which society would face certain extinction or, at the very least, gross vexation.

Okay, so here comes the old guy doddering in with the inconvenient observation that until I was in my early teens, I had never even seen a plastic straw because they simply didn't exist. They came about as the result of another plastic product; the to-go cup lid. Sometime in the 1950s, when McDonald's, Burger King, et.al. started slapping plastic lids on paper beverage cups, it was noticed that the venerable old paper straw, around since the 1880s, couldn't stand up to the sharp little points that resulted when you pushed one through the perforated “X” in the plastic lid. Those points just shredded the paper and so it was deemed necessary to find an improvement. A few attempts were made in the '50s and early '60s, but it wasn't until around 1970 that plastic straws really took over. Then novelty items like jumbo straws and twisty straws came along around 1980, by which time a new generation had totally forgotten that non-plastic straws ever existed. And so plastic – the new standard – became at first ubiquitous then essential. Plastic production rose from about 1.5 million metric tons in 1950 to a staggering 359 million metric tons in 2018. And now, with the world trying to recover from its plastic pollution hangover, some tiny voices started saying, “why do we need plastic straws? What's wrong with paper or metal or even silicone?” And as those voices grew in number and volume and cutbacks and outright bans on plastic straws began to arise, so, too, did the shrieks and howls of protest from those who were willing to swear that they would literally die without access to plastic straws. Die? Really? I cast back in my memory to the '50s and '60s and tried to recall seeing the streets littered with the dead victims of a lack of plastic straws and I just couldn't seem to recall any. Am I missing something?

Moving on, I was reading an article the other day regarding New York's new ban on single-use plastic bags. And the same shrill protesters are at it again, tenaciously clinging to the position that plastic bags are some kind of Constitutionally guaranteed right without which they cannot survive. “Don't take my bags,” they keen. “I ne-e-e-e-d my bags! How will I shop without them? How will I feed my family?” I'm serious. These are questions that are being asked.

Again we go back in time, and again not very far. The first plastic shopping bags were produced in the late 1960s. Oddly enough, they were lauded at the time as a device by which we could save the planet from potential deforestation at the hands of paper bag manufacturers. Who knew back then that there would quickly come a time when the accursed things would be blowing around our streets like polyethylene tumbleweeds, festooning our trees, languishing by our roadsides, polluting our lakes and streams, and accumulating in great slow-to-degrade heaps in our landfills, piles that will take anywhere from ten to a thousand years to decompose.

The first ever “shopping bag” was made of burlap and was in use as the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth. By mid-century a machine was invented that would cut, fold, and paste heavy paper into bags. By the turn of the twentieth century – 1912 to be precise – a Minnesota grocer figured out that people who had to carry cumbersome packages bought less stuff in his store. So he developed an inexpensive, easy to use, prefabricated method for carrying a lot of stuff. It was a simple sack made of heavy paper with a cord running through it for extra strength and stability and to provide a handle. The idea caught on. Within three years he was selling more than a million handled shopping bags annually.

By the time I was bagging groceries at a supermarket in 1968, paper grocery bags came in all sizes, from great big ones for great big orders down to little bitty ones for a handful of penny candy. Occasionally a customer would come in with fabric shopping bags of some sort, but they were usually either really old people or the new hippie weirdos. Either way, nobody used plastic grocery bags......because they didn't exist! And yet somehow the world continued to turn, people managed to shop and to feed their families. They even got to make cool crafts.

My ever-frugal pack-rat of a mother saved every single paper bag that ever came into our house. Sometimes she would reuse them when shopping at a store. More often she would employ them to line household trash receptacles. My schoolbooks were almost always protected by book covers made from brown paper bags. Paper bags made great drawer and shelf liners, too. It seemed there was nothing my mother couldn't do with Scotch tape and a paper bag.

Then in 1969, some Swede came up with the plastic bag we know today and the race to build the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was on. At first, plastic bags were sort of a novelty. Then a few grocers started offering both paper and plastic. (Remember being given that choice at the checkout? I do.) In the early 1980s, major chains like Safeway and Kroger went all plastic and by the '90s, once again an entire generation had no idea there had ever been anything else. So now, when the Big Bad Man comes around and says he's banning plastic bags in order to keep the frickin' planet from being shrink-wrapped, the ninnywhiners who consider polyethylene to be a birthright of some sort start raising the roof and screaming all kinds of nonsense about economic hardship and such dreck.

I'm sorry. I went to a store the other day and neglected to bring one of my dozen or so reusable canvas bags with me. I usually keep a couple in both my wife's car and mine and the rest live in a big burlap bag in my pantry. And this was one of those places where you either brought your own bag or bought one of theirs. Oh, woe is me! What was I to do? I ne-e-e-e-ded a bag in which to carry my groceries so my family wouldn't starve! And these cruel, uncaring merchants didn't offer unlimited comforting, convenient, free plastic bags. Oh, the anxiety! Oh, the panic! What was I to DO?! I'll tell you what I did: I plunked down a nickel and bought a paper bag. And when I got it home, I put it in the burlap bag with the other reuseables. I am my mother's son, after all. I'll think of something to do with it. Point is, ain't nobody gonna tell me plastic bags are an economic necessity. Don't stand there sipping on your four-dollar-a-cup coffee and sucking on your five-buck-a-pack cigarettes and tell me you can't afford a nickel for a paper bag.

Trust me, folks, I'm not some loony lefty who's going to go out and strew recycled organic rose petals in Greta Thunberg's path. But I do believe that we've reached a tipping point in the plastic pollution problem and that we need to get a handle on it fairly quickly. So if I can help in any way by giving up an insignificant personal amenity for the greater good, I'll do it. I'll bring my own bags to the grocery store. After the initial purchase, they cost me nothing other than the inconvenience of having to remember them. And I dropped a few bucks on a nice collapsible metal straw that has a “safe and comfortable” silicone tip and comes with its own “convenient” carrying case. (See. I can pander to comfort and convenience with the best of them.) It fits in my pocket and I've gotten tons of comments and compliments from people who seen me use it. My wife's got one, too.

In and of themselves, neither of these actions are a great sacrifice to me personally. And neither are they particularly significant in the grand scheme. As a friend of mine pointed out, ninety-nine percent of the stuff I put in my reusable bags comes wrapped or packaged in plastic. But you've got to start somewhere and if everyone reading this would do something similar and give one tiny thought to something other than their own comfort and convenience for a minute, maybe something positive would come of it.

Get out of the sackcloth and ashes and stop mourning the passing of something that probably never should have been in the first place. Plastic straws, bags, plates, knives, forks, spoons, whatever are increasingly inconvenient conveniences. They are not necessities of life. We all did fine before we had them and we'll all do fine after they're gone.

Okay. End of rant. But watch out plastic bottles and plastic blister packaging: I'm comin' after you next.