The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [62]
The trash produced by food ordered by delivery was even worse. I rarely had my weekday lunches delivered, but when I was an executive assistant, I often had to order for my boss. Even if it was just coffee, the delivery man would arrive holding a big bag; inside it was a cardboard cup with a protective sleeve to keep you from burning your fingers, napkins, creamers, sugar packets, stirrers, and if the order was for more than one coffee, a four-cup holder—basically, a whole powder-room wastebasket’s worth of trash. I wonder if it’s not telling that the household trash cans of yesterday tended to be much smaller than today’s mammoth tubs.
It’s no surprise that Americans are the world’s biggest producers of garbage. According to Elizabeth Royte in her book Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash, “Since 1960, the nation’s municipal waste stream has nearly tripled, reaching a reported peak of 360 million tons in 2002.” Interestingly, over the course of the same period the number of meals Americans ate in restaurants versus the number of meals they prepared and ate at home has risen nearly that much.
That isn’t to say that the restaurant industry is solely to blame for all that garbage. A home-cooked meal is rarely garbage free, either (unless you harvest your own foods from your farm or garden, and compost the debris). But packaging now accounts for 30 percent of all landfill space in the United States, making it the single biggest category of trash. Packaging includes the boxes that frozen foods come in, or the cardboard containers hot French fries are served in. It’s a sturdy, crisp shopping bag from a boutique, the elaborate box a bottle of perfume might come inside, the foam peanuts and crumpled newsprint that boxes are shipped with, and so on. Packaging is simply “trash waiting to happen,” wrote Heather Rogers in Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage. And it’s an essential part of the takeout or delivered restaurant meal.
Cans, bottles, egg cartons, and shopping bags from grocery store purchases all add to the national waste stream. But individual takeout meals that feed one person at a time come with a lot more disposable paper and plastic goods per serving. It’s been estimated the U.S. population tosses out enough paper and plastic cups, forks, and spoons every year for them to circle the equator three hundred times. And many of them are unwanted and never used, like the sauce packets and extra menus that Ben would routinely throw out. All the extraneous trash waiting to happen, so to speak, also takes massive amounts of energy to produce, and some materials they’re made out of, like plastics, don’t ever properly decompose.
So the more whole foods one cooks with, I found, the less packaging is produced. Foods like fresh produce generally go into plastic bags by the handfuls and can be used for several meals. Dry grains like rice and flour can make dozens of single servings at the price of one bag, waste-wise. Processed or prepared foods from the grocery store, however, come with more packaging. Sometimes they’re individually wrapped inside boxes, like snack brownies and cereal bars, or come with disposable trays, like frozen dinners. Often, they’re portioned off for one serving only, such as small cups of yogurt. I realized that the more I cooked from scratch, with whole foods like vegetables from the Greenmarket, or flour for bread, the less packaging I would go through as a general rule; the more processed the food, the more waste it creates.
In her book, Royte decided to weigh all the garbage she alone produced on a daily basis, and she was surprised to see how much solid bulk she tossed away on her first day. The trash included an empty wine bottle, a milk carton, and a peanut butter jar, dense objects that, for their purposes, would have been made to last more than one use in an earlier time. I had plenty of these containers around my apartment, too, waiting to hit the recycling bins or trash cans once they were used up. But I was still convinced that eating in created much less