My teenager will piddle around in the kitchen from time-to-time, although it looks as if she may have inherited my culinary skills. Not too long ago, she made a couple of batches of brownies for an event. When I asked her why she threw the first batch away, she responded that it had a plastic-y flavor.
“Hmm,” I said. “I wonder if the flour picked up some of the taste from the canister.”
“That could be,” Millie replied. “But I’m thinking it had more to do with the spatula that I baked into it.”
We have taken to referring to that particular dessert as “brownies spatchatori.”
Because I had to purchase a new spatula following this little incident, I got to thinking I should get one that wouldn’t melt. I had been wanting to get away from plastic as much as possible anyway, so this funny incident gave me that opportunity. Better yet, I decided to shop at the thrift store for my new spatula, which offered a double whammy of guilt-relieving shopping. Lest I come off as too eco-tistical (I really hope I just invented that cool new word), rest assured that my six-year-old still talks me into getting a worthless plastic toy from gumball machines on the reg.
Nevertheless, I believe it’s always worth trying to reduce bad habits. From what I understand, plastic can take over 1000 years to degrade, basically breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces, but never really changing into organic matter.
Plastic does a little something called “photodegrading,” rather than biodegrading, as organic matter does. Now see, until recently, I thought the word “photodegrading” had to do with how I feel when I see postpartum pictures of myself, but it’s actually much more complicated than that. It has to do with the sun’s break down of plastic. The process of photodegrading takes forever, and the little junk Clementine gets out of the gumball machine won’t be broken down in my lifetime or hers. The only kind of plastic that photodegrades fast is whatever kind the manufacturers used to make the vinyl decking we thought had a lifetime guarantee.
As it turns out, humans are not the only ones who despise the taste of plastic; apparently the helpful bacteria that break down wood, hemp, or even metals hate it too. They won’t touch the stuff, which is why it sticks around -- basically forever -- after it’s created.
It’s hard to get away from buying plastic though! Even some fabrics contain it. I learned this is a strange way. My husband Joel came in the house and smelled burning plastic. This, in and of itself, is miraculous, because his olfactory glands work about as well as the “Anyone Can Decorate a Beautiful Cake” kit I bought last year. Anyway, he alerted me and we both started hunting the house for the source of the smell. I checked to see if the iron was melting something, though that was unlikely because no one has ironed since 1998. Joel checked Millie’s room to determine if she had left on the glue gun again.
After a few minutes of fruitless searching and intensifying odors, I glanced in the dining room to see smoke rising from the chandelier. A dark fabric object was draped across the lightbulbs, emitting the nauseating odor. I screamed helpful directions: “The thing! The light! That! Whatsit! There!”
Joel grabbed the edge of the fabric and ran for the door, carrying the smoldering bundle. We stomped out the burning item and examined it. It was, or rather, had been, my middle school son’s small duffle, melted now into a glob of gooey plastic. My son wasn’t even home. How did that bag get on the chandelier? I called Dashiell. “Oh. I wondered where that thing went,” he said calmly.
Apparently, on his way out of the door, he had thrown the bag toward the table. No surprise there, since the dining room table is where my family members throw pretty much everything. But the fact that the bag landed on the chandelier, which is a full four feet above the table top, doesn’t bode well for my son’s future as a quarterback.
The point is, I had thought this bag was made of sturdy canvas. Once I smelled the plastic and saw the melted goo, I realized that this item will now be in the landfill until Dashiell’s great-great-great-great-grandchildren are buying duffle bags of their own.
