The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [66]
As I was placing the Styrofoam takeout tray onto the scale, squinting to read that it weighed just under 1 ounce, I began to feel like this was all slightly ridiculous, my weigh-in. I also began to wonder whether its weight was really the end of this story. Or whether it was the most important one.
Let’s start with the plastic bag that the takeout meal came in. Granted, in addition to the plastic takeout bag, I had also used a plastic bag to take home the broccoli from the Greenmarket. But flimsy plastic bags in general amount to a whopping mass of waste throughout the planet. Even though many Americans have replaced them with reusable cloth totes when doing their shopping, they’re a tough staple to do without in a lot of cases, like with fresh meats and produce. The reusable bags have made great strides in recent years, and more and more people than ever bring them to grocery stores instead of opting for the store’s plastic or paper. However, the trend hasn’t become so popular in the takeout food world—or, for that matter, when shopping for anything else.
Sometimes when I need a snack at work, I head down to the nearest fruit cart on the street. The same vendor always tries to offer me a plastic bag to carry my purchase of one single piece of fruit. He isn’t making a special case; everyone else I see is offered one and almost always accepts it. In the same vein, the ubiquitous coffee-and-bagel carts in New York City are notorious for handing customers a single cup of coffee in a brown paper bag, with a pile of paper napkins. In most cases, the bag becomes trash the moment it leaves the vendor’s hands. I can’t figure out the reason for all of this—if it’s meant to protect the customer from handling a piping-hot cup, then what’s the use of the ultrathick stack of napkins?
These carts are placed close to office buildings for convenience, too. The cart nearest my office is about six or seven paces from the building door. I’ve caved to that temptation and grabbed a bagel or croissant on occasion. The first few times, I felt guilty chucking the brown paper bag the minute I got upstairs, so I began waving away the bag whenever a vendor snapped one open to put my purchase in. So what if people saw me holding a cold bagel on the elevator, I figured? It’s a bagel, not a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor.
Every lunch hour I saw coworkers coming back to their desks carrying bags that hold a single plastic case of tossed salad, or prepared, buffet-style food. The way I saw it, a paper bag is no easier to clutch than the container the food is typically wrapped in already. As long as there aren’t eight things being carried in the bag, it didn’t really offer much more ease.
One logical answer might be the need for someplace to put the forks, napkins, and other utensils. I didn’t see these as very difficult to carry in addition and, what’s more, plastic cutlery is completely inferior to actual flatware. I tried to keep my own metal fork and knife at my desk at work, and I washed them every time I was done using them. They were pretty simple to keep, and I didn’t have to deal with the flimsy prongs of the plastic fork struggling to do its job.
Moving on to the foam tray that held the bulk of my takeout meal: It’s no news that the polystyrene foam packaging material is nonbiodegradable. It’s been banned in the cities of Berkeley, California, and Portland, Oregon, since 1990, and it continues to be checked off by cities throughout the United