This morning I went to work on my food prep for the week. I cut open a plastic tube of pork sausage so I can make scrapple for this week’s breakfasts. My mom used to make scrapple as a special treat and I still love it. Scrapple is corn meal mush, with either sausage or meat scrap mix-ins, that’s cooled in a loaf pan to be sliced and fried. I also opened up a plastic and styrofoam package of mild Italian sausage for pizza toppings. After browning both types of sausage, I stored them in plastic reusable storage containers.

I considered storing them in glass because too much plastic is bad. Microplastics are everywhere and I’ve been hearing a lot about how I shouldn’t use plastic wrap – hello sausage packed in styrofoam and plastic wrap – and how I should not store food in plastic – looking at you tube of pork sausage – and I should never, ever, store stuff in Z *loc bags in the freezer because it’s not safe either – is that the same plastic as my frozen vegetables arrive in?

I’m a bit on the aged side. Enough that, I remember milk being delivered in glass bottles on my family’s doorstep. The bottles had paper caps. I also remember that if you bought meat it came wrapped in – wait for it – paper! Now I know for a fact that I did not petition the dairy industry to take glass bottles away, but they did it anyway. They went to paper cartons with paper spouts that folded closed. I didn’t believe that was a good replacement for glass bottles but delivery was fading away and it made sense. Then they – always the faceless ‘they’ of business – began the ceaseless march to plastic. Plastic caps on cardboard milk containers eventually gave way to the entire milk container – from head to toe as it were – fully constructed in plastic. I don’t remember at any time the consumer requesting these changes. I don’t remember looking at the counters in the grocery thinking ” Oh how lovely. It’s all in plastic. What an improvement!” But I do remember understanding that none of these changes had anything to do with my preferences.

Why am I going on about plastics you ask? Or maybe you don’t ask. It’s because I don’t remember feeling any great lack in life because I drank out of glassware, or that we packed our lunches in metal and paper. Big bottles for water? Only the fancy people had those, and I think way back then even Sparkletts was dispensed in glass. Water seemed abundant, we could find a drinking fountain anywhere we went. That meant we didn’t need to carry our own unless we were off to the wilderness, and then we brought a metal canteen. My point is, we were generally fine without plastic everywhere and in everything. We generally did not need it.

Why do we currently have so much plastic in our lives that it’s now present in our bloodstream? It wasn’t because we asked for plastics. Here’s an example why we have plastic everything; the weight of a 12 oz (volume) bottle made of glass is 193g, where the weight of a 12 oz (volume) bottle made with plastic can be as low as 30g. It’s about profit margins, which include fuel costs. This website is a good example as to why; https://www.drugplastics.com/resource-hub/blog/glass-bottles-vs-plastic-bottles-lower-cost-gives-plastic-the-advantage

But back to my cooking today. If we had abundance why did we change anything? If we are happy with what we have today, why change? This week I’ll make scrapple and pizzas at home. The cornmeal is still stored in paper, along with the flour, except my Bluebird Flour, it comes in a flour sack. I certainly don’t feel any loss because my flour is in a paper bag. But I will end up storing it in a sealed plastic canister since that is what I already have. Sometimes our problems stem from just one person’s sense of lack, even when it’s misguided enough to count as greed, is used to make the decisions for those of us who are content with our abundance. If it wasn’t cheaper to make and sell products made with plastic, would we really use so much of it? In a world where profit matters the most in decision-making, outcomes are either profitable or not.

Mark 8: 36 For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?