Reuse

Sometimes on Sundays we get a coffee in the grocery store and have been trying to remember to take along our re-usable travel mugs from home — it struck me one day that we keep buying single servings of drinks and coming home and throwing away the cups.

At many work places, people can use their own reusable containers from home to take to the kitchen for coffee or water cooler for drinks, but a lot of people still use the styrofoam cups. This is one of my favorite David Imhoff facts although the number has increased, “Americans’ coffee habits consume upward of 100 million throwaway cups, sleeves, and lids in a single day in the United States alone. A coffee is downed in ten minutes, whereas the Styrofoam cup that contained it could outlast the marble of Michaelangelo’s David. The same applies for … any other product with a shelf expectancy of six months and a landfill expectancy of many centuries.”^[1] Where I work, they moved the styrofoam cups up into a cupboard instead of leaving them sit out, and put up signs asking people to bring a mug from home. One year later they posted a thank-you sign that styrofoam cup usage went down by 49% — that’s a reduction of 245,000 cups in a year. This year for their 50^th anniversary they gave each employee a mug.

Even the paper cups at most places are not recyclable because of the polystyrene coating in the cups that makes them waterproof. According to Starbucks’ website, they aim to have recyclable cups by 2015. They give a 10 cent discount to anyone with a reusable cup.

Dinner today was at my mother-in-law’s which, with her sister, Natalina, visiting from Florida, was even more of a foodfest than usual. She served calzones as one of the appetizers, just to give you an idea. I’ll make them soon – for dinner – and provide a recipe (since I need to take a photo!).

The baked ziti (pictured above) was in one of her smaller baking pans compared to her lasagna pan. She doesn’t follow recipes for her pasta dishes so I’ll have to video her someday; I’ll wait until her other sister is visiting from Italy this September.

I found out that Natalina, like her sister, also has a couple of freezers full of food in addition to a large refrigerator/freezer in kitchen. Both have only two people in the household. My mother-in-law says that she grew up in Italy during the war and was hungry the entire time. Now she’s making up for it. This is a bit off-topic, but if you have adopted children, they may feel the same way when they become adults, even though they never missed a meal with you. Once when we were talking to my oldest daughter about hoarding food, this was more than ten years after I brought her to the U.S., my husband told her that she’s been given three meals every day and will get three meals again tomorrow, and she replied, “You don’t know that.” Some people can never forget hunger at a young age. Now my other two don’t seem to be effected by it, so it depends on the person. Someday when I have time I’ll start a blog for adoptive parents.

We came home with enough leftovers for another dinner, but tomorrow is Tony’s day on the menu and he is preparing the slow cooker. It will sit in the frig overnight and my daughter can start it before she leaves for work (she got her first real job!).