In search of glass or wood or paper or cardboard or...

According to a friend of mine who is a chemist, plastic begins to react with food in a matter of minutes, meaning that food becomes contaminated with greater or lesser quantities of chemicals, depending on the food, the temperature, and the type of plastic used to make the container.

Minute amounts of these substances, if not eliminated from the body, will build up over time. What may not be toxic in small doses or eaten a few times may cause harm in larger quantities or when eaten over a period of years. We don’t know what health conditions, if any, different levels of different chemicals may produce or inhibit. Did you know that arsenic used to be a beauty treatment (it gave you lovely skin)? Then it was discovered that the body does not eliminate arsenic. It just builds up to that final, fatal dose. Terminal beauty, indeed.

Since these questions are of concern to me, I decided to quit buying food in plastic. After some weeks of grocery shopping with this in mind, I have to tell you I am shocked at my lack of choices. Try to buy food not wrapped in plastic! Even when I buy fresh produce from the bins, I have to put it in plastic bags. The only cheese I could find that wasn’t wrapped in plastic was Edam, still cheerfully packaged in red wax, or Laughing Cow, its neat little triangles wrapped in foil paper.

Consider bottled water. It sits in plastic for days or weeks waiting to be consumed, and it sits mostly in warehouses and on grocery store shelves, not in a refrigerator. I decided to buy Perrier, which I remembered comes in glass. I found that even Perrier has a plastic option – and that is the only Perrier option in Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer.

I decided to store food in glass and was amazed at the prices I was asked to pay (and all the glass storage containers have – you guessed it – plastic lids). So I went back to my old practice of saving good jars for leftovers and buying only a few of the nicer glass storage containers for use in the microwave or for those leftovers that need to be frozen. Peanut butter jars and spaghetti sauce jars with wide lids and the squat little salsa jars make great storage containers for leftovers – and they’re free!

I have found that it is possible to decrease my exposure to plastic contamination, but I have to be persistent and inventive. To eliminate plastic containers from my life I’ll have to move to another country!

Plastic, plastic everywhere

I remember laughing at a line in The Graduate, many years ago. The hero, Benjamin, is home from college and is trying to get a handle on life. His home life is absurd, his parents are absurd, his future is murky, and he is surrounded by people who all seem to be as alien as Martians. At his graduation party, Benjamin is cornered by an inebriated guest and told that the secret to life is plastic. It was a great joke and I laughed, taking it as yet another comment by Mike Nichols on the absurdity of the society we live in. Now, of course, I see what that advice was about – the guest was telling Benjamin how to get rich.

Plastic, in the late 60s, was the coming thing. It was cheap, indestructible, and could be molded into any shape you could dream of. No longer would you break your shampoo bottle in the shower if you dropped it. America was sold.

What did we do before plastic bags? We put produce into small paper bags. We put our accumulated purchases in large paper bags. We reused those bags all the time – to take out trash, to wrap parcels, to line cake tins, to make hand puppets, to line the kitty box and the bird cage. And when they were discarded, they rotted (moist paper in a land fill decomposes in a matter of weeks). We had cardboard boxes, glass bottles, and wooden crates.

Now, over 40 years later, plastic is ubiquitous. It remains cheap, indestructible, and incredibly versatile. There are a lot of issues with respect to its use (pollution, land fill, the ever expanding “continent” of floating plastic in the ocean, the fact that, in general, it takes 1,000 – yes, one thousand – years for it to disintegrate, etc.) but we’ll leave those issues for wiser heads.

What concerns me in this particular blog is the fact that we may be poisoning ourselves by buying and storing food in plastic. I’ve known for a long time that I shouldn’t microwave food in a plastic container or put hot food into a plastic container that’s headed for the fridge. For years I’ve refused to buy milk in plastic containers because the milk just tastes funny.

What I didn’t know is that the chemicals in plastic begin to react with food stored in it in a matter of minutes, regardless of the temperature of the food or drink.

Online Work is Working Out

I have to report a crashing lack of interest in my grant-writing career. It sprang up, flourished in the zero-oxygen world of non-profits for a brief moment, and died of exhaustion. I simply stopped getting up, dressing up, and showing up, which pretty much put a bullet in the head of my ambition.

Face it – I have a very small amount of ambition for anything that becomes tedious, and seeking grant writing opportunities became tedious fairly quickly. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but I wither fairly quickly without encouragement, and I got very little encouragement in this endeavor. I put it all back on myself. I’m just not someone who thrives on meeting and talking with people. In fact, it wears me out in a hurry.

So I decided to axe the people part of technical writing and just do the writing. I haven’t made much, but I’ve made 100% more than I did at grant writing!

There are days, like today, when I spend far too much time indoors, at the keyboard. I have been below this entire day, ignoring pathetic looks from the dog and my own eye strain as I apply, apply, apply for writing jobs on the internet. I just finished a series for a friend’s new magazine and sent those off. She likes the articles, which is great, but they’re freebies. Great practice, no money. My hit rate online is now about one in 20, which overall isn’t the worst. The money has, finally, begun to increase. If I can just be patient. If I can just trust that this is, finally, the forum that best suits my talents.

The wonderful thing about working online is the fact that I communicate almost entirely by the written word. I don’t have to hurdle the obstacles of age or physical appearance, nor do I have to appear sprightly, competent, and grateful for employment. I’m not much good at any of that. Of course the bad news is that to date the gigs don’t pay much and they don’t take long to do.

I have finally started exploring other online writing options as well. What on earth takes me so long to move out of my comfort zone? I guess it’s like anything else – I have to be miserable enough to take that leap.

I have got to walk that dog.