Stan Geiger

Green Potato Chips?

I don't usually buy potato chips. I mean crap like that has no food value, and it is way yonder overpriced. But I had a coupon, so I decided to indulge. I paid $1.88 for a bag of potato chips. Even with the coupon, I'd say I probably paid about four times what the bag was worth.

I popped the bag open today. An optimist would say it was half full. I'd say it was half empty.

All the talk is about being green these days. Maybe we should start with a federal law that says any container in a grocery store has to be full.

I mean we have store shelves full of half-empty containers. We expend resources building containers that are twice the size they need to be; we throw said containers into landfills. And in some instances, those double-sized containers wind up in the oceans. The oceans are a major source of food for the world. We cannot afford to destroy them.

Back in the day, one could go to a neighborhood butcher and buy some meat. The meat would be wrapped in paper. The purchaser took it home and cooked it. On the same day I bought some chips, I bought some sandwich meat. It was wrapped in plastic and encased in a plastic container that was twice the size of the meat packed inside.

Aside from the fact that all this oversized packaging is aimed at screwing people, aimed at making people believe they are getting more for their dollars than they actually are, it's wasteful. If you want to go green, cool. Let's look beyond the bags in which the stuff you buy is carried home. Let's look at the packaging of the stuff you buy.

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