Sustainable Storage Choices

In my short researches this afternoon, I've found that glass containers are acknowledged as the best, with porcelain, ceramic, and stainless steel following up as good choices. My plans now are to raid the old kitchen things my mom and grandma have given me over the years as they've modernized their kitchens, to find the glass and ceramic containers I know I have somewhere. Next, I'll raid Goodwill and Salvation Army shops (where, bonus!, I usually also find great old vinyl records).

If you'd like to support some green, sustainable product manufacturers, I did come across a few awesome websites that you could check out for brand-new good stuff.

http://worldcentric.org/
http://www.to-goware.com/
http://www.grinningplanet.com/

Other options are glass products from such well-known names as Pyrex, Corningware, and Anchor Hocking.

It's easy to reduce plastics in your kitchen! And I'm even taking one website's suggestion and storing my smaller sewing items in some of the old plastic containers I've removed from the kitchen cabinets. Next on the agenda: get rid of all paper napkins and paper towels. I'm already halfway there.

funky cloth napkins rolled up and ready for dinner

Cabinet Clutter

If you have a kitchen, you have problems with clutter. I don't care who you are or where you live; if you don't have clutter problems, especially in your storage-containers cabinet, you are probably not human.

Today, my mom left the clean reusable I Can't Believe It's Not Butter and Cool Whip containers on the counter after unloading them from the dishwasher, and I set to work putting them away.

"We have too many," I said after several futile stacking attempts, and she agreed.

I pushed around a few more containers and found six Cool Whip containers in the back.

"Do we ever use these? We could get rid of them, you know."

Mom considered, and then said, "Well, I like them for when I make soup in the fall and winter."

Images of plastic containers in the freezer popped into my head. Then, in CSI-like quality, I could see the plastic poisons leaking into my mom's frozen soups, like cartoon neon-green poison fumes in old episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

"Mom, I want to buy you new containers."

At first, she wondered why I would want new containers when we already have containers. I'm a chronic reuser, after all. But when I explained my fears of plastics, especially old ones, she saw what I meant.

"I mean, if you don't want to ..." I said.

"Well, I don't want cancer, either!" she said. So I set to work.


Most of the containers are recyclable #2, #4, and #5, which is great (they won't go to landfills yayy!). And some of the unlabeled lids will fit nicely under flowerpots in the potting shed. But what are we going to store Mom's soups in this winter if we get rid of all of these?

...which is what I'm researching this week. Mom remembers her mother and neighbors exchanging foods in glass canning jars, so I'll start there and see what other options I have. Stainless steel? Protected aluminum? Wood? We'll see. Stay tuned.

A Response to Science

Last week, my friend was on her lunch break in a high-rise office building in downtown Philadelphia. From her cubicle, she emailed me this article by Wray Herbert from Newsweek.com. Today, while wrapped in a blanket at my computer, I read two blogs from my classmates: The Turning of Self from Mark Anthony, and A Cold S(easonally) A(ffected) D(isordered) Place from Kristin. All three of these online nuggets got me thinking about science.

John "beauty is truth, truth beauty" Keats probably rolls in his grave each time something is proven true by science. But in the case of the Newsweek article above, it seems that science is proving the truth of beauty, at least as far as natural beauty is concerned. Imagine! A study has proven that overworked and stressed-out jobbers out there in Officeland are calmed and reenergized by a walk in the park.

In Kristin's blog, she writes about the effect a dark, cold winter can have on our emotions. She asks, "Do people who live in a wooded area have lower blood pressure?" And Mark Anthony, while walking off a bit of melancholy, reflects, "Interesting how much control our moods can have over what we see and take notice of." Do our moods control what we see, or does what we see control our moods?

It seems, according to the scientists featured in the Newsweek article, that it might be a little bit of both. Stressed-out workers seemed to calm down with the very image of a natural setting before them. But after a three-mile walk, with time enough to reflect on their surroundings, get their brains to calm down after some busy deskwork, their entire bodies began to calm down. And it wasn't just the exercise, as the control group proves. "Interacting with nature shifts the mind to a more relaxed and passive mode, allowing the more analytical powers to restore themselves," says Herbert.

That's why I'm so thankful for the weekly assignment this semester to spend time outside, no matter the weather. I find that I stroll my backyard and visit local parks more often than I would have otherwise, even when I'm not working on an assignment. When we take our natural, animal selves outside, it's a brief reminder of what we are at the very bottom of things. We are not spreadsheets and editor's marks and state educational standards; we are flesh and bone, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, hearing, seeing, smelling, and feeling. And maybe that added perspective is what really brings us back down to earth.