My Greens are Greener Than Your Greens

It’s amazing how stupid people are. Unfortunately, I am a person, so my generalization applies to me.

When I was a kid, there was no such thing as a plastic trash bag. People put their trash in paper grocery bags that leaked and tore. Garbage was disgusting. You would simply throw your bags into your rusty galvanized can, and it would rot and ooze until pickup day. The cans stank even when they were empty. Indoor cans also stank and had to be washed out. It’s not like that today. I have indoor cans that have never been washed, thanks to plastic bags. They still look and smell new, apart from the holes my pets have chewed in them.

Digression: I use the words “trash” and “garbage” interchangeably, because the dictionary gives pretty much identical definitions for them. A lot of people think “trash” means dry stuff like paper, but Mr. Webster disagrees.

It’s sort of remarkable that the human race didn’t start using plastic as its default material for trash bags until I was out of diapers. In patent law, one of the requirements for a new patent is that the invention must be “nonobvious,” and that means it’s not obvious to “one skilled in the art.” The use of plastic for trash bags should have been obvious to everyone, not just bag manufacturers. Plastic bags already existed. For some reason, the little wires in people’s heads didn’t touch, and we were deprived of a great boon for a disgracefully long time.

The Internet says plastic bags were first used for institutional trash in 1950, and Glad introduced plastic trash bags to the public in 1966. They took a surprisingly long time to catch on. Paper bags were commonly used during the first few years of the next decade.

We didn’t have trash bags, but we did have Baggies. These were thin polyethylene bags for food storage. People put them in lunchboxes and so on. They came with little wire ties because the bags didn’t have zipper closures on them. Baggies, or a similar product, were introduced in 1957, so why did consumer trash bags take so long?

When zipper bags came out, the writing was on the wall for Baggies. When I go to the store, I can’t find Baggies. I guess they were discontinued long ago.

I have bought zipper bags for decades. I don’t like them. They’re small and expensive, and the zippers often fail. The zippers are stiff, so the zipper end of a bag always has to be relatively straight. You can’t gather it up.

Really cheap people wash them and reuse them, but who wants to do that? It comes across like a mental disorder, and the bags take forever to dry. Said the guy who actually tried it.

I used to walk around in grocery stores, lamenting the absence of Baggies, pushing a cart containing produce I had stuffed in bags that were almost exactly like Baggies. Again, the little wires failed to make contact.

I started eating salads for breakfast recently, and that means I had to deal with lettuce. I ended up with a storage problem.

It all began with concerns about washing lettuce. I wondered if it was really necessary. I doubted restaurants did it. Washing lettuce is time-consuming, and in the end, you get wet lettuce which is hard to dry.

I checked the web to learn whether washing lettuce was actually important, and I read some disgusting stuff. Evidently, it really is important. Things like sand, bugs, worms, frogs, and fecal bacteria are found on vegetables, even if the packaging says, “Pre-washed.”

As if it were necessary, I am reminded why I have no respect for vegetarians. They love telling us they’re “eating clean” and that meat makes us sick. They also have a big bias against cooked food. Guess what? Frog poop isn’t clean, but a nice steak is. Bacteria can’t do much to the inside of a steak, because it takes them weeks to get there. Microbes can’t do much to people who eat cooked food, because cooking kills germs. Their precious salads kill lots of people every year! Have you ever noticed that nearly all germ-related food recalls involve vegetables?

Okay, that’s not totally true. Ground beef gets a few recalls. But it’s worth the risk, because it’s meat!

You can use a device called a salad spinner. It’s basically a spinning colander in a bowl. You spin your greens and hope the water goes out through the holes. I started looking for a salad spinner. I could not find one that didn’t get awful reviews. They break. They warp in the dishwasher. They’re useless.

OXO used to make a good one, but of course, they quit and replaced it with one that falls apart.

Until I figure out what to do about a salad spinner, I will be rinsing lettuce in the sink and standing the leaves up in a colander to dry. Then I have to store the ones I don’t eat right away. That involves bags.

I can use gallon zip bags at a minimum of about 13 cents each. Okay, I admit it. This adds up to maybe $12 per year, so I can probaby swing it, but it still annoyed me. The bags are not as versatile as a produce bag, they hold a lot less, and I can get produce bags for three cents each.

Needless to say, I just ordered 700 produce bags off Ebay.

“Wow, an eccentric saved himself $7 per year. Why should I care?” I’ll tell you why.

I have a big roll of Costco plastic wrap. It’s useful for covering bowls, but that’s about it. When you wrap things like cheese and bread, it’s a pain to use. It clings to itself and wads up, and you can never open it up so you can use its full length and width. It’s narrow, so it can be hard to get it to cover a dish or bowl well without using several wraps.

It gets on my nerves.

A big ol’ produce bag will hold a fairly large dish or bowl. You can just shove it in there. The bag won’t stick to itself, either.

“The bag won’t close!” Sure it will. If whatever you put in it is under a certain size, you can tie an overhand knot in the open end of the bag. If it’s bigger, you can rest the bag on top of the open end, closing it.

It’s genius.

Obvious genius.

I can also use a produce bag to line the bottom of Marv’s pooping basket. I have a big basket for him, and he sits on the handle when he has to poop. When I’m lucky. I used to put newspapers in the bottom, but I quit subscribing. A three-cent bag will do the job fine.

I already use big cheap bags to line his cage. They’re fantastic. So much cleaner and easier to handle than paper. Every day, he gets a new bag. His poop tray stays clean.

I bought the cheap bags for him, but now I use them for trash.

I found that trash bags ran around a quarter apiece, which is ridiculous. We buy very tough bags when we don’t really need them. If you’re a lazy sack of manure, and you only take your trash out once a week, okay, maybe you need a strong bag. You’ll want something tough so you can crush the trash every day with your shoe to make room, and while the trash is sitting in your kitchen, it will rot and feed roaches, ants, and mice. If you’re a clean person, you’ll remove all the edible garbage from the inside of your house every night, and you’ll get rid of it before it causes problems. You only need your bags to hold a reasonable amount of trash, and they don’t have to hold it very long.

I buy 30-gallon bags for 10 cents each. They’re wonderful. A truck just pulled up and dropped 1500 of them on my porch.

I was an idiot to buy Hefty bags. They’re for suckers. There’s a reason why you never see them at malls, stadiums, and so on. Their crews use cheap bags like mine.

I can still use zip bags and plastic wrap for certain purposes, but basically, I have switched over.

If I still lived in Coral Gables, where the nutbars have banned economical, environmentally sound plastic grocery bags, I would buy a stack of those bags and take them to the store with me. I would drop them in front of the cashier and say, “You encourage people to bring their own bags. Eat your words, baby.”

There is a ban on providing plastic bags for customers. There is no ban on customer-owned plastic.

I may get a couple of rolls of mid-size produce bags, between my trash bags and the produce bags I just ordered.

Of course, I feel bad about filling landfills with so much plastic. It probably adds up to half a pound per month. Clearly a crisis. I’m sure it would be a lot better to use several pounds of paper bags which never degrade once they’re covered with fresh trash. Your greenie virtue-signaling bags will still be intact when your great-great-grandchildren are in assisted living. Then there’s the environmental damage associated with the paper industry.

Don’t think about it. Listen to great geniuses like Jessica Alba and Whoopi Goldberg. How can they be wrong if they’re famous?