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.