by Cathy Erway
Cans, bottles, egg cartons, and shopping bags from grocery store purchases all add to the national waste stream. But individual takeout meals that feed one person at a time come with a lot more disposable paper and plastic goods per serving. It’s been estimated the U.S. population tosses out enough paper and plastic cups, forks, and spoons every year for them to circle the equator three hundred times. And many of them are unwanted and never used, like the sauce packets and extra menus that Ben would routinely throw out. All the extraneous trash waiting to happen, so to speak, also takes massive amounts of energy to produce, and some materials they’re made out of, like plastics, don’t ever properly decompose.
So the more whole foods one cooks with, I found, the less packaging is produced. Foods like fresh produce generally go into plastic bags by the handfuls and can be used for several meals. Dry grains like rice and flour can make dozens of single servings at the price of one bag, waste-wise. Processed or prepared foods from the grocery store, however, come with more packaging. Sometimes they’re individually wrapped inside boxes, like snack brownies and cereal bars, or come with disposable trays, like frozen dinners. Often, they’re portioned off for one serving only, such as small cups of yogurt. I realized that the more I cooked from scratch, with whole foods like vegetables from the Greenmarket, or flour for bread, the less packaging I would go through as a general rule; the more processed the food, the more waste it creates.
In her book, Royte decided to weigh all the garbage she alone produced on a daily basis, and she was surprised to see how much solid bulk she tossed away on her first day. The trash included an empty wine bottle, a milk carton, and a peanut butter jar, dense objects that, for their purposes, would have been made to last more than one use in an earlier time. I had plenty of these containers around my apartment, too, waiting to hit the recycling bins or trash cans once they were used up. But I was still convinced that eating in created much less trash than taking out. For example, I had the same bottle of soy sauce in my cupboard that I’d been using for months. With all those packets, containers, and plastic cutlery (which Ben would never use when there was a real fork around), takeout could easily create double the amount of trash of a home-cooked meal, I projected.
I suddenly remembered some of the horrors of modern-day catering. When I was working at the publishing house, I ordered business lunches twice a week for meetings. I’d order the meal for the group and unload it in the conference room. A basket of paper-wrapped half sandwiches came wrapped in cellophane and decorative ribbons—an actual wicker basket of them. The wraps were wrapped in paper, and each sandwich half was speared with a wooden toothpick. The side dishes came in sturdy plastic serving bowls, with sturdy plastic serving spoons and tongs, some that were extra and never used, and a bowl of salad always came with three or four tubs full of different types of dressing (most barely touched by the end of the meeting). There was a large plastic platter of cookies, brownies, and other desserts, also wrapped in cellophane. Everything was thrown out after the meal—from the baskets to the tongs. (Weren’t tongs and serving spoons meant to be made with quality, to be used in kitchens for close to a lifetime?) All of these disposables were too big to fit in a single tall garbage bin in the office kitchen. And the next week, the same exact order would be placed again, with the same amount of trash.
At another company I worked for, the upper management had a fondness for ordering from a shop that served individually boxed sandwich halves. After conferences, the kitchen was filled with leftovers, stacks of cardboard boxes with a cellophane window built into one edge that showed the insides of the particular sandwich half that it held. Most people took two or three boxes at lunch to fill up.
Fancy packaging from high-end restaurants may be one thing, but even fast food or the cheapest takeout place offers a pile of inedible waste with every order. In the Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan recalls the allure that fast food at McDonald’s held for him as a child, noting that the food was wrapped up like “little presents” and that he didn’t have to share any of his own items with his sisters. This speaks to a strong attachment we must have as a culture to wrapped-up food, just like we want our presents to be nicely wrapped.
So, I concluded that not eating out had whipped me into a lean, mean, less-garbage-making machine. But by how much less? I wondered. Was there a way to find out, maybe by comparing the total waste of an average cooked-at-home meal to that of one average takeout meal? I decided to follow Elizabeth Royte’s example and do a mini-weigh-in myself.
Of course, there is no such thing as a perfectly “average” or “normal” homemade meal or takeout meal to make this comparison airtight. But just for curiosity’s sake, I thought I might try to make the exact same dish I could buy from a takeout restaurant. For this I went with an easy category for me: Chinese stir-fry. I decided I’d place an order for a single lunch-sized serving of chicken with broccoli and white rice, and make the same simple dish at home for one. Then I’d weigh all the garbage produced from each version and see which took the heaviest toll.
To get started, I first purchased a kitchen scale. Earlier that week, I’d picked up a head of broccoli from the Greenmarket, which was wrapped in a single plastic bag in the fridge. To get the chicken, I went to a small butcher shop in my neighborhood. I pointed to the boneless chicken breasts behind the glass case, and the butcher raised an eyebrow when I told him that I wanted just one. Shrugging, he wrapped the half pound or so of meat in butcher paper and slipped it inside a small plastic bag. The rest of the ingredients I’d need to make this dish I had at home already: rice in a large plastic bag in my cupboard, sauces in bottles and jars, some garlic. This was just the kind of dish I’d make all the time: a stir-fry with one type of meat and one veggie. You could make four portions of the same, satisfying thing in under one hour, easily.
Around this time, I was becoming more wary of not only how much waste I was creating, but how environmentally friendly the actual foods I purchased were, too. I’d read The Omnivore’s Dilemma and was avidly devouring magazine articles and websites having to do with the sustainable food movement, which was then not yet really a movement. I felt guilty as I walked home from the butcher. I would have bought some chicken from the farmers’ market if it had been open that day, at a stand that sold cage-free and humanely raised animals. I had read up on horrifying facts about chicken coops where the animals spent their short lives squashed together, and was sympathetic to these and other conventional meat animals’ poor health and living conditions. I’d also read FastFoodNation, and the E. coli in hamburger meat that had created a scare, described in that book, was now turning up in vegetables like spinach. As time went by, I would find out about the problems of runoff from those great big feedlots, how it was contaminating water supplies, and how monoculture (the practice of planting only one plant variety), favored by industrial agriculture, threatened crops and biodiversity. It seemed like most of our food supply was being controlled by very careless corporations. In middle school, I’d overhear students crack jokes about the gray hamburger patties in the cafeteria. As long as I was in a place to make a decision about what to purchase and eat and what not to, I’d stick with the more responsibly raised meats, I’d decided—which happened to be tastier and less “gray” than the others.
All this new food awareness was gradually weighing in on my food-buying choices. Since I was buying raw ingredients to cook with, I was faced with decisions like whether to buy organic, humanely raised, or pesticide free all the time. This was another unexpected result of my not-eating-out mission: I was now forced to think about where that meat or that vegetable came from and how it was grown. Eating in restaurants, you don’t often have that choice as a consumer. More and more, restaurants tout the names of the farms or purveyors where their ingredients came from. But this trend is mostly among more upscale eateries, often expensive ones, too. And that was something I really couldn’t afford all the time. I figured that with the money that I was saving by not eating out, I
could afford to be choosy and to buy based on principle. Hence, eating in, and cook ing everything, was the catalyst for my interest in healthy, sustainable, seasonal, local, and generally more earth-friendly food.
I added another feature to my blog to showcase this in every recipe I posted. I called it the “Green Factor,” and it rated the environmental friendliness of all the ingredients in the dish, combined. After every Green Factor rating, I tried my best to explain why it was rated so, digging into the implications of all the foods, how and where they came from. Ultimately, I stopped eating meat as frequently, since the pastured meats I now wanted to strictly support were more expensive, and I didn’t feel that I was sacrificing my health by having meat only once or twice a week. On the contrary, you could argue that less meat in our diet keeps humans and the earth healthier. That chicken breast that I got from the butcher for my weigh-in experiment had been the first piece of meat I’d bought in a week.
Once home, I chopped up some garlic and a few slices of ginger from a knob that was drying in my cupboard. I couldn’t remember exactly how these had been packaged when I’d gotten them. I no longer had the original bags, but I guessed that I had bought them originally in plastic ones. Still, I was using so little ginger and garlic for one individual-sized portion of chicken and broccoli that these bags would be almost negligent in my waste weigh-in.
Calculations got trickier when it came to the sauces I put in the dish. I added a few splashes of soy sauce to marinate the chicken, along with a spoonful of cornstarch. While the chicken was cooking in about a tablespoon of vegetable oil, I added a splash of Chinese rice wine, followed by another few splashes of soy sauce and some jarred hot sauce. All these things came out of glass bottles or jars except for the cornstarch, which was in a small cardboard box. All these ingredients, too, had been in my kitchen for the better part of a year. How many one-pint servings of chicken and broccoli, then, could each bottle make? The task of weighing out the refuse for my single serving proved excruciatingly difficult, especially since most of these bottles in my cupboard were only partially full. In the case of the rice wine, I thankfully used up the last two tablespoons or so from the bottle, so the weight of the bottle was easy to calculate. But the soy sauce bottle was about half full, so I had to divide the weight of the contents printed on its label by half. Following numerous tedious calculations, I sat down to make the following list:
¾-POUND CHICKEN BREAST:
Butcher paper from chicken = 0.25 ounce (perhaps mostly because it was wet)
½ POUND BROCCOLI:
Plastic bag from the broccoli (did this really weigh anything? It didn’t register on the kitchen scale ...) 0.005 ounce
1 TABLESPOON SOY SAUCE:
Total weight of empty bottle = 15.5 ounces
Number of 1-tablespoon uses per bottle = 34
So total glass waste of a 1-tablespoon serving (15.5 ÷ 34) = 0.45 ounce
2 TABLESPOONS RICE WINE:
Total weight of empty 24-ounce bottle = 16 ounces
Number of 1-tablespoon uses per bottle = 28
Number of 2-tablespoon uses per bottle (28 ÷ 2) = 14
So total glass waste of a 2-tablespoon serving (16 ÷ 14) = 0.43 ounce
1 TEASPOON HOT CHILI SAUCE:
Total weight of empty 18-ounce plastic jar = 5 ounces
Number of 1-teaspoon uses per bottle = 102
So total plastic waste of a 1-teaspoon serving (5 ÷ 102) = 0-05 ounce
1 TABLESPOON CORNSTARCH:
Total weight of empty cardboard box of cornstarch: 2 ounces
Number of 1-tablespoon uses per box = 56
So total cardboard waste of a 1-tablespoon serving (2 ÷ 56) = 0.035 ounce
1 TABLESPOON VEGETABLE OIL:
Total weight of empty (because I drained it!) 24-ounce plastic bottle = 1 ounce
Number of 1-tablespoon uses per bottle = 28
So total plastic waste of a 1-tablespoon serving (1 ÷ 28) = 0.035 ounce
TOTAL GARBAGE WASTE FOR SINGLE SERVING OF HOME-COOKED CHICKEN WITH BROCCOLI: 1.255 OUNCES
For the next part of the weigh-in, a couple of days later, I picked up the phone and, with a paper menu in hand, dialed the number of the nearest Chinese takeout restaurant. I ordered a pint of chicken and broccoli, served with white rice, and a can of soda. Then I waited.
An order of plain old chicken and broccoli from a slipshod Chinese takeout restaurant with fiberglass between the counterperson and the customer would not ordinarily have been my meal of choice for compromising my not-eating-out mission. This sacrifice was purely for the purposes of the weigh-in. Still, as I walked down the street to pick up my order a few minutes later, I realized how strangely excited I was about eating it. I’d had this same dish countless times throughout my life, near identical in flavor and appearance, from countless Chinese takeout places that were nearly identical in appearance as well. By the time I finished my lunch, which was quite a lot for one person, I was strangely satisfied. The meal wasn’t great—actually, it was a lot worse than I’d expected it to taste: too sweet, the sauce thick and gloppy from too much cornstarch. But maybe that was a good thing for now. I’d be able to keep eating in a little more confidently now than if it had been better.
I made sure the kitchen scale was set at zero before I weighed all the disposables from the takeout meal. On went the foam tray, now emptied, along with the fork, stack of napkins, extra sauce packets, paper bag, and the plastic bag that had held everything. The takeout place had given me a can of soda as part of the lunch special, so after it was emptied I placed it in the scale’s basket as well, along with the straw and wrapper. The number on the dial was difficult to read, but it told me that the total weight was slightly more than 3 ounces all together, somewhere between 3.25 and 3.5. My $18 investment in the kitchen scale and $5 takeout lunch had been justified: the Chinese takeout meal weighed significantly more than the 1.255 ounces I produced in cooking the same portion of my homemade version. (I decided to leave the soda can’s weight out of the total for this, too, since I didn’t drink soda with my homemade version of the meal.)
As I was placing the Styrofoam takeout tray onto the scale, squinting to read that it weighed just under 1 ounce, I began to feel like this was all slightly ridiculous, my weigh-in. I also began to wonder whether its weight was really the end of this story. Or whether it was the most important one.
Let’s start with the plastic bag that the takeout meal came in. Granted, in addition to the plastic takeout bag, I had also used a plastic bag to take home the broccoli from the Greenmarket. But flimsy plastic bags in general amount to a whopping mass of waste throughout the planet. Even though many Americans have replaced them with reusable cloth totes when doing their shopping, they’re a tough staple to do without in a lot of cases, like with fresh meats and produce. The reusable bags have made great strides in recent years, and more and more people than ever bring them to grocery stores instead of opting for the store’s plastic or paper. However, the trend hasn’t become so popular in the takeout food world—or, for that matter, when shopping for anything else.
Sometimes when I need a snack at work, I head down to the nearest fruit cart on the street. The same vendor always tries to offer me a plastic bag to carry my purchase of one single piece of fruit. He isn’t making a special case; everyone else I see is offered one and almost always accepts it. In the same vein, the ubiquitous coffee-and-bagel carts in New York City are notorious for handing customers a single cup of coffee in a brown paper bag, with a pile of paper napkins. In most cases, the bag becomes trash the moment it leaves the vendor’s hands. I can’t figure out the reason for all of this—if it’s meant to protect the customer from handling a piping-hot cup, then what’s the use of the ultrathick stack of napkins?
These carts are placed close to office buildings for convenience, too. The cart nearest my office is about six or seven paces from the building door. I’ve caved to that temptation and grabbed a bagel or croissant on occasion. The firs
t few times, I felt guilty chucking the brown paper bag the minute I got upstairs, so I began waving away the bag whenever a vendor snapped one open to put my purchase in. So what if people saw me holding a cold bagel on the elevator, I figured? It’s a bagel, not a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor.
Every lunch hour I saw coworkers coming back to their desks carrying bags that hold a single plastic case of tossed salad, or prepared, buffet-style food. The way I saw it, a paper bag is no easier to clutch than the container the food is typically wrapped in already. As long as there aren’t eight things being carried in the bag, it didn’t really offer much more ease.
One logical answer might be the need for someplace to put the forks, napkins, and other utensils. I didn’t see these as very difficult to carry in addition and, what’s more, plastic cutlery is completely inferior to actual flatware. I tried to keep my own metal fork and knife at my desk at work, and I washed them every time I was done using them. They were pretty simple to keep, and I didn’t have to deal with the flimsy prongs of the plastic fork struggling to do its job.
Moving on to the foam tray that held the bulk of my takeout meal: It’s no news that the polystyrene foam packaging material is nonbiodegradable. It’s been banned in the cities of Berkeley, California, and Portland, Oregon, since 1990, and it continues to be checked off by cities throughout the United States, including virtually every major one in California. There was a movement against polystyrene foam packaging when I was small, probably back in the early nineties when it was being banned in other places, and I remember my grade-school teachers instructing us to avoid using this nonbiodegradable packaging material at all costs. That’s the last memory of public outrage over polystyrene foam packaging that I can recall. But these days I see it being used for takeout foods and drinks more than ever, from Dunkin’ Donuts coffees to Jamba Juice smoothies—and now, Chinese takeout food.