Like many modern husbands, I take my turn doing the dishes several times a week. We have a dishwasher, which we fill with plates and glassware and most all of our silverware, and it gets run every few days as well. But we eat fresh food, made with selections from the produce aisle with ingredients added that all require measuring and mixing and preparing so that by the time dinner is on our plates, a small pile of pots and pans and kitchen tools all need attention outside the dishwasher.
We always try to make enough food to have leftovers, too. My wife still works full time and takes a couple or three baggies with her each day. Salad, snacks and maybe something else travel well in these highly portable totes, and accompany her glass jar filled with her main course. When she gets home, they silently join the pots and pans on the counter.
Sher is watching our grandkids and facilitating their virtual classroom work during the pandemic. She could eat the same thing for lunch that the kids are having, but, really? The kids are picky eaters and their time-stressed parents battle just to get them to eat at all. What little they do eat doesn’t do a Boomer’s body a lot of good, either. So Sher packs a lunch the she likes, but which the grandkids abhor.
Now we both were raised to be members of the clean plate club. Most parents are familiar with the club, which has no president or leaders, just membership and dues to pay. The dues require eating everything on one’s dinner plate regardless of what it may be or taste like.
Growing up at our house we heard the lament that we had better clean our plates, after all there are starving children in Europe! We lived in a strongly Catholic household and my parents employed standard Catholic guilt to prod us into eating our canned peas. In case guilt alone wasn’t enough, my dad had scores of sermons for us to sit through while he watched us to clear our plates.
When it was our turn to parent fussy eaters, I tried out what I had learned from my parents. But my kids were too quick, questioning how eating broccoli at our house was going to help out a kid in Milwaukee, much less London. They had me, there.
It was always a struggle, but Sher inventively provided our kids good meals even as they knew first-hand from the school lunch room that other kids could live on Ho-ho’s and Little Debbie cream pies.
We lived in the country and when our oldest daughter began kindergarten, we proudly and nervously watched her board the school bus her first day. It was an all day kindergarten and she had lunch at school. We had raised her on garden veggies fresh, and from the freezer. As we expectedly waited for her to get off the bus and tell us about her first ever day at school, these were her first words:
“Momma! What did they do to the peas?” She had obviously never tasted a canned pea before. It must be an acquired taste, much like beer.
So now our kids are the parents themselves and children’s nutrition continues its historic slide. Their kids are active and energetic but it has to be the blessings of youth, not the food that fuels their bodies. Our adult children are opposed to using the guilt-trips we tried on them with their own children, but are stymied by kids whose taste buds seem to have been programmed by someone that believes all food worth eating comes out of a box. So rather than join them for lunch, Sher sets the example by unpacking real food for herself.
Earth Day is every day at our house. We don’t want to be wasteful, and really believe that plastics are a toxic curse upon the Earth. So we wash and re-use our baggies for lunches and many other small tasks. But I take a look at the counter and think to myself: “Where do all of these baggies come from? Don’t I have anything better to be doing?”
As much as I think that I do not use them, baggies show up on the counter throughout the day while my wife is out of the house. I don’t have any idea where they come from. I do know this, however. I have a duty to deal with them. My wife finds washing and rinsing used baggies to be tedious, and so she often leaves them for me until it is my turn to do the dishes. She is busier and more time-constrained then me, so I am okay with that.
But as actions speak better than words, I really must not have anything better to be doing. I have a six-armed drying rack hanging off the kitchen wall. I made it for drying herbs and such, but the crush of plastics has taken over all its arms. And we have added an absorbent pad, anti-microbial at that, to stack up more baggies to drain and dry on the counter. It is not so quick as the drying rack, but hey, at least there is no waiting for a parking spot on the counter top.
So now I have become the Bag Man. I wash and scrub and rinse old baggies. I hang them and stack them and then when they are dry, I fold them and sort them into a handy space in the drawer. Except for the world-weary, worn and hopelessly soiled ones that with regret, I consign to the landfill.
I know that there is too much plastic in the world. I know that it is building up in our air and our waters and thus in our bodies with accumulating toxic side effects. If I did not know this, I would find washing baggies to be a too trivial use of my time.
Most sane people would waste their used baggies, instead of their time. I can’t do much to right the wrongs in this world. All I can do is to right what wrongs I can within my own world. I wash out our baggies.