When packaging was the least of our worries
IWAS once told the packaging industry had done more than any other branch of human endeavour to improve the standard of health of the human race. This may well be correct. I look back fondly on my childhood in the “good old days when everything was better”, and I think some parts of it may not have been as great as we remember.
When you went shopping and bought a pound of sugar, the shopkeeper scooped it out of a hessian sack lying on the floor and poured it into a brown paper bag. The local street dog had probably lifted his leg against that sack from time to time, but who cared?
Bacon was sliced from a haunch of fly-spotted meat hanging from a rafter. Tea and coffee came from huge plywood chests with the shop cat sleeping on them. Sweets and chocolates were scooped out of glass jars and weighed into paper packets.
Now, of course, all our foods and groceries come in sterile, germ-free, heat-sealed plastic containers that are totally “safe”, apart from the fact that they are destroying the planet.
Indeed, they are so carefully sealed that it sometimes takes a lot of ingenuity to get to what we actually bought. Charcoal braai briquettes, for example, come in sturdy paper bags sealed with a line of sewing.
If you are very clever you can get to the contents by finding a certain “end” and then gripping it and pulling it firmly. Theoretically, this allows the sewing thread to slide smoothly out and leave you with just a single piece if string and a neatly opened bag. In reality, this happens only once out of every 30 bags you buy. All the rest end up mangled, with a pile of very short bits of string and a ragged sack you’ve attacked with a meat knife.
Products like yoghurt and feta cheese come in sealed tubs with a secret tab you have to find and break before being allowed access to the contents. Anything sold in a container with a “childproof ” lid requires a child to open it.
Some packaging comes in many layers so once you’ve found the little red strip, and pulled off the thin outer plastic, you come to the perforated tab you have to peel back to reveal a cardboard box with the health warning printed on it. Open that and you find each biscuit or chocolate individually sealed in its own sachet which is nestling cutely in a little paper cup resting in a heat-moulded plastic tray.
You’ve brought home 26 pieces of indestructible plastic and 12 chocolate chip cookies. The cookies last five minutes and our great-grandchildren will be wondering how to remove all that plastic from the sea. But we tell ourselves packaging makes us healthier than our grandparents were.
Last Laugh
Billy came back to the riding school in a rather scruffy condition and dismounted from his horse. His pants were torn and his shirt was mud-stained. “What happened?” asked the instructor. “We had a difference of opinion,” said Billy. “He wanted to go one way and I wanted to go another.” “So what did you do?” “He tossed me for it.”