Eight for the April Complainers

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: It’s been a few turns since I’ve vented my spleen shared by little annoyances with you, dear readers. I’m not in my usual gay and cheerful springtime mood, probably because I had twelve inches of heavy, wet snow followed by icy rain this past Thursday and Friday. Oh, and did I mention my power, internet and cell service going out for three days? Ha ha! What a lark. If TS Eliot had lived in Maine, his fingers would have been too frozen to write “April is the cruelest month.”

Thrown into a peevish frame of mind, I tend to dwell on other irritants, insults and injuries. Which means you, dear readers, get to hear about them in convenient list form.

 

Unrecyclable pill bottles. Okay, I acknowledge this is petty ante. On an individual level. But they add up – boy, do they add up. I have two prescriptions I fill every thirty days. Twenty-four of the little orange plastic bottles and their tops a year. Almost one hundred over the past four years. Two hundred in eight years, etc., etc. And there’s NOTHING you can do with all those bottles! I’ve used a couple to store coins in foreign currency. A couple more to hold Tylenol and ibuprofen in my purses. After that, I’m stumped. Too small for almost any other use, the pharmacy won’t take them back, and it’s not the right kind og plastic for my town’s transfer station.

I’ve gotten to the point where every time I take my amlopedine, I picture a giant raft of pill bottle floating in the Pacific Ocean. Which is not doing much for my blood pressure, I assure you.

 

Grocery stores with no one available to ask questions.  I have to say, I hadn’t noticed this as much until I went to the second Market Basket to open in Maine. (There are two.) It was wonderful! So. Many. Employees. Someone to help me find the grapefruit. Someone to check if the sales price was still good. Someone whisking the abandoned cart in the parking space away before I even had the chance to grab it!

It was an eye-opening contrast to my usual store, where I wander lonely as a cloud if I have a question. They used to have a customer service counter/check out, but that’s gone now. I guess it was a warning.

 

“Dollar stores” whose prices have gone from a dollar to $1.25 and now as high as $7!  I think we can all agree this is basically a crime against humanity. Allegedly, the C suites at these companies have noticed “people with money” shop there, and therefore process can go up. How do they know that? I, personally, have never had to show my most recent tax filing to the clerk ringing up my bleach, birthday cards and movie candy.

 

The eternally changing recommendations for healthy eating.  My last doctor told me to stop eating an egg daily, it was contributing to my high blood pressure. The current doctor told me eggs are fine. We were supposed to not diet, and listen to our natural hunger signs. No, now that’s wrong (admittedly, my natural hunger signs are for M&Ms and Oreos.) Protein is good. Too much protein is bad. Avoid carbohydrates. You need carbohydrates.

I’m considering adopting my grandmother Greuling’s eating plan: bread with every dinner, lots of canned, salty vegetables, 4-5 Pall Malls a day and one glass of port in the evening while knitting and watching TV. She lived until a week before her 89^th birthday, and never needed any care other than some help with the housework in the last few years.

 

Ads on subscription services I already pay for.  Amazon Prime, I’m looking at you: not only am I paying with both my wallet and my eyeballs, but I’m increasingly presented with a menu of viewing options consisting of two or three great shows I want to stream and eight thousand warmed-over two-star duds. P.S., I immediately mute the ads and scroll on my phone until they’re done.

 

Restaurants that present the “bill” on an ipad.  First off, I have spent too many years nagging my kids to put their electronic devices down in restaurants to bend the line for the restaurant itself. Second, I don’t want a “convenient email receipt.” I’m not an idiot; I know this means I’ll be getting emails from The French Farmers Table, and anyone it sells my info to, for the rest of my life. Third, I tip well. Twenty percent on the whole, tax included, and I round up. I find myself getting viscerally offended when I see those handy pre-loaded tip amounts, which lately start at 25% and go up. Also, I’m sus, as the kids say, about just who gets all that tip when it’s totally electronic.

 

Interesting new recipes I can make almost entirely from what I have in my pantry EXCEPT for one have-to-have-it spice/curry/sauce that’s only available via mail-order from a specialty store in NY or DC. (Yes, I get these recipes from the NY Times and the Washington Post, which is undoubtedly part of the problem.) Please, recipe section editors, take pity on those of us in flyover country. Yes rural Maine is definitely fly-over country.

 

Dear readers, what little irritants are getting up your nose this week?

Photo credits from top to bottom: Macwagon (Flickr), Advantus Media, Amazon, Imanoj Menon (Flickr)

Plastics are forever...

HALLIE EPHRON: I am (still) haunted by the oceans of plastic waste that we humans are generating daily. I have given up plastic wrap and bring my own bags to the supermarket. When I do take a plastic bag for produce, I bring it back the next trip. I put out my recycling bin every week loaded with the plastic bottles and jars that seem unavoidable. Though what exactly does "recycling" mean happens to plastics? Because plastic virtually NEVER decays.

Zephyrschord [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

Still, I hold my nose and buy Legoes and plastic dinosaurs for my grandchildren and a play house for the yard made out of... plastic. I try to buy at yard sales.

The sheer amount of plastic my tiny household consumes seems totally unnecessary. Every container of hummus, every clamshell package of tomatoes, every gallon container of milk...

The one thing I do try to do is buy one squeeze bottle of, say, Dawn dishwashing liquid, and a much larger one to refill it from. I think in some small way I'm cutting down on plastic waste. But wouldn't it be better to use a dish brush and a block of something (you know, like SOAP). But what truly enrages me is fancy plastic packaging that is deliberately designed NOT to be reuseable. My Award for Wasteful Packaging goes to SHOUT gel stain remover. It comes in a fist-sized plastic bottle with a rubber brush affixed to one end. Which works very nicely when you apply. HOWEVER. That rubber brush does not come off so you can't refill the container. That's a lot of plastic for 8 ounces of stain remover.

(Runner up prize goes to toothpaste manufacturers. Have you noticed that toothpaste comes in smaller and smaller tubes? NO ONE recycles toothpaste tubes. WHY CAN'T someone invent an effective tooth powder? It should be simple, right?)

What's your candidate for a Wasteful Packaging Award? And how about suggestions to the manufacturers on how to be better world citizens... if they can make Fake Meat then why not Fake (biodegradable) Plastic?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: So--there's a bottle of something, aspirin or contact lens solution or whatever. It comes in a plastic twist off container. The container goes INTO a box, a box that's way bigger then the container, and then it has a paper pamphlet of instructions, and then the box with the container and instructions inside is sealed in shrink wrap plastic. Um. When the amount of stuff that you throw away is more than what you keep, that's a sign.

Plus, batteries. In those sealed things that you can NEVER OPEN.

LUCY BURDETTE: I do hate the ones you can't open--they often come that way from BJ's or Costco. But I also hate the plastic and styrofoam packaging in Publix supermarkets. Really, we can choose our own cucumbers, you don't have to double wrap them for us!

RHYS BOWEN: I am trying hard to eliminate plastics from my life. I live in California where you now have to pay for any bag at the store. We do take reusable bags. Electronics packaging drives me mad. Impossible to open. And the amount of waste around face products and cosmetics. Ridiculous.

Unfortunately part of this is to prevent pilfering or tampering like the Tylenol tragedy.we all have to become good people!


JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Youngest got out of Maine Medical Center about a week ago after a four day stay - she's fine now! - and I was horrified by the vast amounts of waste generated. Everything, everything is single use and disposable. Of course, I know that's smart for a hospital - better things tossed out than possibly increasing the (already higher than it used to be) risk of infection. But it made me more determined than ever to do what I can to reduce, reuse and recycle.

Living by myself, I produce one 13-gallon bag of trash every two weeks, which I think is good, but I'd like to get it down further. Like many people, the bulk of my trash is non-recyclable plastic. Why, oh why can't manufacturers offer more recyclable packaging? I'm not talking about stuff that's bolted into three layers of plastic so it can survive the ocean voyage from China; I mean all the food products that USED to be available in glass that are now on the shelves in single use plastic. I recently stocked up for summer cookouts and bought ketchup, mayonnaise and relish. Not a single brand in my local Hanneford came in a glass bottle or jar. I would have happily paid a little extra to purchase something recyclable, but I never had the chance. 

Oh, and my vote for most wasteful isn't for the packaging per se but its ubiquitous nature ; prescription bottles. Too small to make any other use of, you can't return them to the pharmacy, you can't recycle them, and even if you're not overloaded with medications, boy, do they pile up.

HALLIE: Here's a web site that purports to tell you how to recycle medicine bottles. But what about unused medications??


JENN McKINLAY: Everything should be wrapped like old fashioned lightbulbs. Simple recyclable cardboard container that barely keeps them from being smashed. I am trying so hard not to use plastic in my every day life, but it is EVERYWHERE.
I have great hope, however, as the BBC reported there is a female researcher in Mexico who has figured out how to make plastic like containers that are biodegradable from...wait for it...cactus. Wouldn't that be something? Non-toxic and biodegradable plastic like material from cactus? Here's the film link.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Hallie, there is a vendor at our farmer's market that sells blocks of handmade dishwashing SOAP. No packaging. I'm going to buy one next week. In the meantime, I buy in a big bottle and refill my small one.

And toothpaste, as Hank says--didn't people use to brush their teeth with baking soda? (I recently gave into a sonic toothbrush, having been encouraged by my dentist after just having a crown, ugh) and have discovered that you only need about a quarter of the toothpaste that you use on a regular brush. So surely that helps some...

I take reusable bags for groceries, and don't bag produce unless absolutely essential. I shop at the farmer's market and the local butcher. We use a Brita filter for our tap water. I just bought a S'well water bottle to carry with me in the car. Still, even though we try to be conscientious, we completely fill our recycle toter every week with the unavoidable plastic, cans, glass, and cardboard, and paper. (And I still take a couple of paper newspapers, ouch.)

And I also wonder just where exactly our recycling is going these days?

HALLIE: That's what I wonder. I wonder if any of our readers know: What happens to all that plastic we dutifully put in the recycle bin? Is it US that's dumping it in the ocean?