The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [63]
I suddenly remembered some of the horrors of modern-day catering. When I was working at the publishing house, I ordered business lunches twice a week for meetings. I’d order the meal for the group and unload it in the conference room. A basket of paper-wrapped half sandwiches came wrapped in cellophane and decorative ribbons—an actual wicker basket of them. The wraps were wrapped in paper, and each sandwich half was speared with a wooden toothpick. The side dishes came in sturdy plastic serving bowls, with sturdy plastic serving spoons and tongs, some that were extra and never used, and a bowl of salad always came with three or four tubs full of different types of dressing (most barely touched by the end of the meeting). There was a large plastic platter of cookies, brownies, and other desserts, also wrapped in cellophane. Everything was thrown out after the meal—from the baskets to the tongs. (Weren’t tongs and serving spoons meant to be made with quality, to be used in kitchens for close to a lifetime?) All of these disposables were too big to fit in a single tall garbage bin in the office kitchen. And the next week, the same exact order would be placed again, with the same amount of trash.
At another company I worked for, the upper management had a fondness for ordering from a shop that served individually boxed sandwich halves. After conferences, the kitchen was filled with leftovers, stacks of cardboard boxes with a cellophane window built into one edge that showed the insides of the particular sandwich half that it held. Most people took two or three boxes at lunch to fill up.
Fancy packaging from high-end restaurants may be one thing, but even fast food or the cheapest takeout place offers a pile of inedible waste with every order. In the Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan recalls the allure that fast food at McDonald’s held for him as a child, noting that the food was wrapped up like “little presents” and that he didn’t have to share any of his own items with his sisters. This speaks to a strong attachment we must have as a culture to wrapped-up food, just like we want our presents to be nicely wrapped.
So, I concluded that not eating out had whipped me into a lean, mean, less-garbage-making machine. But by how much less? I wondered. Was there a way to find out, maybe by comparing the total waste of an average cooked-at-home meal to that of one average takeout meal? I decided to follow Elizabeth Royte’s example and do a mini-weigh-in myself.
Of course, there is no such thing as a perfectly “average” or “normal” homemade meal or takeout meal to make this comparison airtight. But just for curiosity’s sake, I thought I might try to make the exact same dish I could buy from a takeout restaurant. For this I went with an easy category for me: Chinese stir-fry. I decided I’d place an order for a single lunch-sized serving of chicken with broccoli and white rice, and make the same simple dish at home for one. Then I’d weigh all the garbage produced from each version and see which took the heaviest toll.
To get started, I first purchased a kitchen scale. Earlier that week, I’d picked up a head of broccoli from the Greenmarket, which was wrapped in a single plastic bag in the fridge. To get the chicken, I went to a small butcher shop in my neighborhood. I pointed to the boneless chicken breasts behind the glass case, and the butcher raised an eyebrow when I told him that I wanted just one. Shrugging, he wrapped the half pound or so of meat in butcher paper and slipped it inside a small plastic bag. The rest of the ingredients I’d need to make this dish I had at home already: rice in a large plastic bag in my cupboard, sauces in bottles and jars, some garlic. This was just the kind of dish I