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Superbowl Sunday/ Food and Drink

Paper or plastic? Sometimes you're going to get a grocery bag, whether you like it or not. The culture is set up to hand you your purchase in a bag, and when everybody is buying beer an hour before kickoff, the checker at the grocery store does not want to hear about your environmentalist bullshit. Even in Cambridge.

The question then becomes one of minimizing the damage. Nobody wants to grinch-out on the Superbowl, especially when the hometown team is playing. Sure, it would be more earth-thrifty to make tamales and serve them on the husks, but for REAL Patriots fans, tamales do not constitute Superbowl fare. What follows is a brief analysis of one party's non-solution to the problem of the less-wasteful superbowl.

Pizza seemed at first like it would be a good superbowl food. If you're willing to be messy, you can eat it without a plate. Plus, those cardboard boxes seem recyclable. They're not any different from the regular paper boxes you recycle on the curb, right?

Alas, the crowd called for plates. (See far right column). And even if you believed in recycling as a waste-management policy (see upcoming Sparrowpost exclusive), the pizza boxes are on the Cambridge Public Works DO NOT RECYCLE list. The lesson? Make it at home. Save money and boxes.

Wings, the logical accompaniment to pizza also came in a plastic box in a plastic bag. We tried to recycle the plastic box. But does plastics recycling really work? See the International Plastics Task Force website.

Beer. Thank God. It comes in bottles and cans, both emminently recyclable. And as a special bonus, we were able to get a bottle redemption from the local liquor store. Cheap people rejoice.

 

 

 
Superbowl Sunday/ The Plastic Plate Investment

Resealable Bag protects your investment.


As is the case in most 20-something's households, there were not enough real plates to go around on Superbowl Sunday. Nobody had the foresight to borrow plates, and it seemed that the only option left was to buy the disposable kind.

The superbowl guest who was given plate duty this year came up with a fabulous solution to the disposable plate problem; the purchase of EXTREMELY sturdy "disposable" plates. As counterintuitive as this may sound, these extra-tough plastic plates might have been the best solution to the problem. (Even over the flimsy paper plates, which, though they seem recyclable, usually require doubling or tripling up to work.)

Whereas there is no chance of re-using the paper plates, these disposable plates were designed to be re-used many times; (an example of another ven-diagram intersection between cheap people and environmentalists). This point is re-confirmed by the packaging of the plates, which arrived in a re-sealable plastic bag designed to protect "your investment."

After the game, they were washed, and, looking as good as new, put away for the next time a major television event rolls around.