Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Grocery bags

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You know, sometimes I just want to slap someone. So far I have successfully suppressed this urge. But the time is a’comin’ I’m just not going to be able to hold back.

In today’s SF Chronicle is a story about how the grocery strike has been avoided (yay!), with another story about an idea of requiring supermarkets in the city to charge 17 cents for every plastic or paper bag.

Getting consumers to cut down on grocery bags is a noble goal, but is charging them 17 cents apiece the best way to achieve it?

Today, the San Francisco Commission on the Environment is expected to adopt a resolution urging the Board of Supervisors to pass an ordinance requiring supermarkets in the city to charge 17 cents for every plastic or paper bag “to reduce the proliferation of unnecessary bags and provide funds to mitigate the negative impacts caused by them.”

A fee of 17 cents seems like a lot considering the deposit on standard beverage bottles and cans in California is only 4 cents, and that is refundable to anyone who brings in an empty.

Under the grocery bag proposal, there would be no refunds for shoppers who return bags and thus no motivation for people to paw through trash bins plucking bags out of the waste stream.

So the big problem with the proposal is that people wouldn’t have any incentive to pick up trash. Like they do so well with that now. And maybe a fee would stop them introducing the bags into the ecosystem in the first place.

This is where the urge to slap someone comes in.

We really are the people with the greatest sense of entitlement in the world, aren’t we? These bags have never been free; the cost has been factored into the cost of doing business. But obviously the costs are going up, and rather than spread the pain around to everyone equally, they’ve decided that those who use, get to pay for them.

And this is a problem because people don’t get every damn cent back. I hate our society sometimes.

When I was in Germany almost 20 years ago (and I still haven’t made it back, and now it’s a different country, sob), bags cost 10pf. at the grocery. Everyone there (except the stupid American, who kept forgetting to reuse her damn bags) brought their own bags. It was No. Big. Deal. No discount for having brought the bags, merely a penalty if you didn’t. Whoops, your bad, so you pay. I can’t remember if this is Europe-wide—I think Denmark did the same thing. And in the article it mentions

six nations—Australia, Bangladesh, Italy, South Africa, Taiwan and Ireland—levy taxes or have enacted bans on plastic shopping bags. It says that in Ireland, plastic bag usage dropped 90 percent in the first year after that nation imposed a fee of 15 cents per bag.

Almost two decades after the first time I saw it in action, paying for bags gets proposed here—wonder what 10pf. is in today’s money?—and people go freakin’ nuts. And this is in the recycle-everything Bay Area. (At the bottom of the article there’s a note that says there’s an upcoming bill to charge consumers statewide 15 cents per bag, which would be really good.)

What’s especially stupid is, those quoted in the article talk about this as though you need to pay the extra money. In fact, it’s completely possible to avoid the fee. All you have to do is bring your own bag. It’s a habit you have to learn, but once you learn it: bing, you’re done. Buying a canvas bag at Lunardi’s or Cosentino’s—mind you, haven’t priced them at Target; they’re probably even cheaper there—costs $10. Ten dollars. We live in a world of $3 lattes, so ten bucks==not that much. If you save 17 cents every time you use one of these bags, I figure it’s going to take you about 60 trips to earn back the cost of that bag.

Think you’re going to go to the store 60 times during the life of these bags? Remember, they’re canvas. They’re sewn. They’re damn near indestructible. You’re going to fall apart before it does. And if you double-bag frequently, you earn the bag back in 35 trips.

I love using my canvas bags. It’s so much better than piling plastic bags up to the ceiling in my pantry.I’ve taken armloads of the high-quality paper Lunardi’s bags with the handles out to the recycling box myself—they’re great bags, but I can’t reuse them for anything. I reuse the grocery bags in small trash cans around the house. In fact, once a month I don’t take my canvas bags shopping with me, so I can restock on plastic bags.

Should the market pay for my trash can liners? Hmmm. Wait a second, let me think about that…

Augh. Okay, I can’t slap anyone. I’m gonna go eat some chocolate and shake my head a lot.

What else I’m doing besides cooking

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Cooking and reading about cooking and writing about cooking is not the sum total of my life these days.

It’s a gigantic part of it, of course (although after reading through my favorite food blogs I find my inner voice saying, Shut up about your excitement over learning to boil water already, would you?). But it’s not everything.

I have been writing. Not quite at the NaNo pace, but at the current moment that pace would be pretty hard to keep up. I was stuck for quite a long while on one particular plot point—no matter what I did or how I cajoled, my main character wouldn’t do what I told her to. I got nowhere with my rewrite for, dare I say it, weeks until last week I did an “interview” with my main character, me typing questions, “hearing” her responses. It was spectacular fun and reminded me of that strange way in which writing is an intersection of channeling and psychosis. Whatever. That interview (which lasted three hours) really sparked me to get going again.

Yesterday, in fact, during my Sunday morning writing session (during the weekends pretty much the only time I go and write is Sunday morning—Darin hangs with the kids, plays a little World of Warcraft, I go and caffeinate up and write) I had a spectacularly productive writing session, writing a scene that didn’t even occur during the first draft. I’m still hung up on the same plot point I was before, so I skipped ahead to write something else and found myself eleven pages into it. It felt really, really good to do that writing.

I don’t know why writing has that effect. I know that books and books have been written on the subject, but it’s still the closest thing I have to a mystical or spiritual experience. I see, hear, smell, feel something in my mind, and I write it down on paper to share the occasion with someone else.

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I am also attempting to get back into the swing of things at the gym. I’ve made it at least three days a week since the beginning of the year. My attendance gets iffy when Simon gets a head cold (and boy, he seems to have one at least once a month), because I can’t bring him to the Kids Corner when he has a runny nose. (Hey, I wouldn’t want anyone else bringing their kid in if they had a runny nose; fair is fair.)

Cooking on a Monday

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When Darin came home I said, “I have to stop cooking on Mondays. Or at least cooking anything complicated. Or anything new. I have the kids all day. I’m a wreck by dinner time.”

“What happened?”

“I made a chicken pot pie. And it’s all going wrong! Look at it!”

He looked in the oven. “It looks fine.”

“But it’s not browning! It says it’s supposed to be golden brown! Something probably went wrong with the dough.”

“Okay, you’re having free-floating anxiety. Just calm down.”

“I forgot the mushrooms! Chicken pot pie is all about the mushrooms and I forgot them.”

“It’ll be okay.”

Later, after eating:

Darin: “You know, with mushrooms this would have been perfect, but this was pretty good. In fact, this is the best thing you’ve made recently.”

Diane began to hit her head against the table. “You can’t say that to someone with free-floating anxiety!”

“Because now you’re wondering what was wrong with all the other meals you’ve made? Everything is fine, hon.”

“I’m only making pasta on Mondays.”

“If that’s what you want to do, that would be fine. But this was great.”

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I used the chicken pot pie recipe from The Best Recipe. And I have to tell you: I am a die-hard follow-the-recipe-exactly kind of girl, and something always goes wrong with these recipes. This time it was the pastry topping. Add the flour and salt to the food processor, it said. Okay.

Add the butter, cover them in flour, pulse so many times, and it should look like such-and-so.

Huh. Mine still looks kinda just like flour.

Add the shortening. Pulse in. You should get something that looks like yellow cornmeal.

Hmmm. Mine kinda looks like flour with a few lumps here and there. Food processor works okay, I’m pretty sure of that.

Add 3 tablespoons of water to the dough. Add one more tablespoon if and only if the dough isn’t hanging together.

Is adding 2 to 3 more tablespoons okay? Because that’s what it’s taking me to get mine to hang tough.

In the end it turned out okay—tasty, but the kids wouldn’t eat it (of course). Darin was quite pleased. The pastry topping was tasty. But man…The Best Recipe never runs smoothly for me.