Because there's no other cost-effective material we've invented that keeps the prosciutto airtight (so it doesn't dry out in hours), won't puncture/rip easily, holds up to shipping+stacking, and is transparent (to examine for fat percentage, slice thickness, etc. -- always essential for meats and veggies).
Can you provide a material that does all that but starts degrading after 60 days? If you can, you stand to make a lot of $$$.
Obviously, the main alternative is having someone slice it at the deli counter for you, but that means you could only ever buy prosciutto at places with a staffed deli counter, including the 15-minute wait for the deli counter if you're going grocery shopping at the end of a regular workday...
>Cellophane is biodegradable, but highly toxic carbon disulfide is used in most cellophane production.
What's the motivation (market pressure) to develop such a thing? Plastic is cheap, so without other external pressure, there's no reason for any company to fund the development of something new. This is why pollution and other society-scale problems need a society-scale solution (government regulation).
That’s a good point actually. Up until now it was “impossible” to make a vaccine in less than 7-10 years. The epidemic happened and we were able to make one in less than a year. But there was a fuckton of money to be made in it so we found a way.
In our rush to maximize everything for efficiency we are causing numerous small problems that are adding up, a tragedy of the commons and loss of our humanity. Our culture seems to value efficiency above too much else.
Capitalism tells us that if we're not making money, we're worthless as humans. It's not about hard work or efficiency, just look at the lack of respect for work that doesn't make money (e.g. stay-at-home parents).
I agree that pure capitalism thinks that way, and some cultures are closer to that than others.
> just look at the lack of respect for work that doesn't make money
This conflates individual value with societal/communal. But why should anyone give a dam about stuff that doesn't benefit them? To be clear, I'm not saying people shouldn't give a damn, I saying why couldn't they i.e. why should they be forced if they choose not to.
There's also a nuance to value: Capitalism determines value on the basis on what money people are willing to spend. Firstly, if people go out of there way to ensure money is not involved with something, don't be surprised if it's value is miscalculated by a capitalist system: this is like not winning a competition you never entered. That said, the economic impact of packaging is undervalued because no one is attaching an accurate debt/penalty to it, which is arguably the real problem here.
Secondly, there is a notion that things of value create "market demand", so if little money is offered for something, then market doesn't want it, and people supplying it are refusing to offer what society actually wants. I think this makes sense: people have children even though parental benefits might be low suggesting they aren't really doing it for society, though I've discussed this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24423077
TLDR: Capitalism only deals with societal value; so it only determines your value (of actions, say) on the basis of value to society. People are free to value things outside that system; If you think "people don't care about X" because "people don't provide money for X" then it is you declaring the value of something to be its dollar amount.
In a lot of these cases it's probably true that there's no direct, measurable, benefit. One has to look past the direct benefit to the indirect benefit to understand why we would be forced to do something that has no direct benefit to ourselves.
For example, a property tax increase to pay for improved schools doesn't have any apparent benefit if you're a single adult with no children in school. In fact the whole education system has no measurable benefit to you if you're an adult. It seems like a waste of money. So we can say it has no first-order benefit.
But suppose that the increased funding would help pay for things like civics education. There's a second-order or third-order benefit to paying those taxes. By ensuring other peoples' children are educated in how our Democratic institutions work, they are better able to navigate those institutions, and they will make more informed decisions about their elected officials because of this. If you care about maintaining and improving those institutions then that tax increase is very worthwhile even if you have no kids. But it has no measurable economic benefit.
I think our Capitalist system has gone insane because it no longer acknowledges those benefits that have no tangible monetary value. It also encourages us to think in terms of money above all else. We've gone so far into the weeds with Scientific Management that if we can't measure the direct monetary benefit it doesn't exist. And that's not true.
Being unable to measure something simply means we can't quantify the benefit. It doesn't mean it has no benefit. And that's at the heart of a lot of economic arguments against tax increases. They're arguing that being unable to quantify the benefit implies the benefit doesn't exist. And that's patently untrue in a lot of cases.
That why can't I just opt for that, the civics funding?
I'm not saying that only things with measurable economic benefit should be funded, I'm saying only things with measurable economic benefit OR that people want to pay for should be funded. One or the other, or both. But if neither condition is met, you shouldn't get funded.
and if your opinion is that there is a non-tangible benefit, you need to convince people of that. Our Capitalist system does acknowledge benefits that have no tangible monetary value - by allowing people to freely spend money on what they care about.
So the most "successful" society under this reasoning is one where every parent works and childcare is done by employees instead of parents. There's no economic benefit to raising a young child, so the only other option under your axioms is "people want to pay for it".
Those numerous 15 minutes waiting in a deli line and waiting in a bakery line and waiting in a butchers line add up too. We value efficiency because we need it and you’ll learn the value of time efficiency once you have kids that need to be fed every day and a 9-5 job with a commute.
How did we solve this before? We deprived half the population of their right to work for a wage and had them run around doing all this waiting and cooking. That’s over now and the rest of our lives need to be more efficient.
There's nothing romantic or natural or virtuous about wasting time waiting in line and visiting multiple shops and having less items available.
It's just boredom and tedium.
It's a good thing when we're able to free up time from mundane tasks so we do things that are rewarding to our soul -- whether it's spending more time with your family, playing sports with friends, going to the theater, reading a good book, whatever it is.
I think most people would say that all this new efficiency is crushing peoples souls. Isn't everyone talking about the loneliness of the modern age, the scary amount of people who are depressed at any time, hiding with drugs, the loss of clubs and other social institutions?
I tend to think that we've been selling our soul for efficiency. We'd have so much free time if we we didn't need to consume so much.
Although, yes I do agree that wanting to consume and have more items is causing us to suffer.
What you choose to spend your extra time on is your choice. But that's the point -- it should be your choice to be able to spend it on hanging out with friends, rather than standing in long lines waiting to buy food.
If you want to spend in on working extra hours to buy a third car, I mean that's your choice too I guess. But it's not like wasting your life waiting in line is any better.
Would you agree?
I do believe that our culture is too focused on economic efficiency, and ignoring numerous consequences of that. That might be a separate discussion?
Longer shelf life enables efficient shipping and shopping, which reduces trips taken. This counts towards fuel use, road wear, and vehicle wear.
Counting both the waste and the product that gets used, the total cost is a rough approximation of environmental impact. The less you spend, the lower your impact.
For minor little trips around town, I use the Fiat 500L. It has 5 seats in 2 rows.
For high speed, or a bit more stuff, I use the Subaru Ascent. It has 8 seats in 3 rows.
For traveling with the whole family, I use the Ford E-350 extended-length passenger van. It has 15 seats in 5 rows.
Before I bought the smaller cars, I had to drive the van everywhere. It's a beast, 3 tons empty or 5 tons full. I think I get about 12 MPG, which is efficient per-person when I'm bringing a dozen kids. As a commuter car, the van is horrible.
Even if you have an exciting/fulfilling job (a relative rarity) it gets old very quickly after a few years because most people need some variety in their lives.
Every time I vacation in southern Europe, I love going to markets, picking fruit/vegetables, having prosciutto cut for me. I think the time you claim it takes exagerrated - usually there are 1-2 people in line.
People dream to retire and tend to their garden (very "inefficient"), cooking their meals from scratch everyday, etc.
Lots of cooking shows and shows like "Escape to the country" (BBC) seem to prove my point.
Most people work 8 hrs/day, not 12. If you go to your local supermarket, you'll see tons of people shopping for fresh produce and meat, not frozen or flavorless or expired (???).
You're inventing a total straw man. Yes some people work 12 hour days and eat frozen food but it's a small minority.
If spending lots of time at markets is what you enjoy, that do that. That's what farmer's markets in the US are for. But lots of people prefer to spend their free time doing other things they enjoy. Farmer's markets can get old very quickly too. Sometimes people want to spend just 5 minutes grabbing some ingredients and checking out to make a quick dinner, not 30 minutes visiting different stalls, waiting for the three people ahead of you at each one, and then haggling over prices.
Having someone slice the cheese at a counter comes with its own risks: Have they cleaned properly? Are they treated fairly? Is the price going to go up because now places need a staffed deli, sinks, and equipment? Will it be just deli products or is everything in the grocery store going to be more expensive to pay for this extra stuff? Heck, what sort of impact is all of this stuff going to have on the environment?
I'll add that no matter what, we all are paying for things that we, personally, don't do, haven't consumed, or disagree with. It is part of living in a society. If you buy a pair of pants, you are covering the cost of theft and loss. If you go to the doctor, you are paying for other people's care in addition to your own (heck, that's what health insurance is). You may or may not feel you get much back for your tax money, which is really dependent on where you live in the world.
Northeast US:
Office hours: 9-6pm -> 9 hours (yes, includes "lunch" where people get a sandwich and eat it at the desk) Note that many people work longer, till 7pm or 8pm (startups, etc). Many people need 2 jobs to pay the bills.
Average commute time: 45 mins (you can google it) x 2 E-mail checking/responding at home after the kids go to bed: 1 hr
Total: 11.5 hrs easily (or more if you want to climb the corporate ladder)
So market-browsing/cooking is not your thing - that's fine. But let me just note that we invented all these life "efficiencies" - and are less and less happy (loneliness, drugs, etc).
What's the point?
There are quite a lot of non-packaging related factors that also play into this
Then or now? Running around and being efficient after spending your days working away in an office might not feel like an upgrade to someone who had the other option.
Some people would choose the cheaper of more time consuming alternative, and what is wrong with that? Do we have to have everything possible asap, damn the consequences?
Many of the efficiencies the modern age brought us have been in service of "more" - more house, more car, more entertainment, more clothes, more disposable technology, more status symbols, etc. We totally live in a consumer society, our biggest companies revolve around advertising. The economy would fall apart if people stopped buying stuff they don't need.
Instead of all that we could have chosen the best modernity had to offer and only worked twenty hours a week. That would have been way more efficient than what we have now.
But no, everyone went for the prosciutto. The advertisers won.
Here's the funny thing though. Your perspective changes when you have kids.
As a personal anecdote, we just had our first baby 3 months ago. My wife had spent the last 3 years getting her masters degree and getting her teaching certificate. She pushed hard. It was important to her. She got the email that her certification came through the day after the birth. She didn't care. All she want's to do right now is take care of her baby. That will likely change, and she'll probably work part time sometime in the future. But saying we've deprived half the population of their right to work is missing another perspective. The joy and privilege of raising a family. Yes, the efficiencies are wonderful, and for my wife (and for me), that means more time with our family.
Who is being deprived now? I would hate to see my daughter deprived of her time with Mom so Mom could sit in an office all day. And I feel like our society is suffering because kids aren't being raised by their parents anymore.
I had a similar discussion with my brother the other day. After multiple miscarriages, they're finally pregnant, 17 weeks in and healthy.
He worked from the time he was a teenager joining military reserves, degree in criminology and kinesiology, and finally a provincial constable around 6+ years in to get to where he is.
An hour after their latest ultrasound, his only words were: work sucks.
As a dad: I tried to take as much time as I could, to spend time with my kid when they were very young (sadly, not anywhere near enough).
The times I could during their younger years led to some memorable memories and jokes, which I still lovingly rib them about MANY years later.
I’d rather have been sight seeing or exploring with my kid, but we live in a society where parents aren’t equipped to teach their children.
So for me personally getting those 12 weeks alone with the child would be worth every penny, and can be very liberating for your wife, but the first two months were hard on me. Good luck, what ever you decide.
On the one hand, I agree that efficiency is valued too high. But on the other hand, sometimes, efficiency is what makes things accessible at all.
You don't need to be waiting in line but the meats also don't need to be all precut and stored before they get to the store. Cut some off in the morning and put it in simpler packaging, and if that runs out, Cut a bit more
But prosciutto is more of a niche item that won't go bad quickly, which is why it's usually packaged at a factory in packaging that will last months.
If the bioplastic growth land takes up more space by a certain amount than is used to dispose of regular plastic, that's presents its own set of issues.
Head-scratching a bit there. Corn absorbs CO2 while growing right ?
From https://www.agweb.com/article/corns-carbon-cowboy-busts-outs... ...At 200 bu. per acre, every acre of corn absorbs 8 tons of carbon dioxide. In 2012, U.S. farmers grew almost 100 million acres of corn and absorbed 800 million tons of carbon dioxide...
Citation please? I have dealt with packaging products for 35 years now and it’s expensive. In my experience anything close to what the parent poster described would result in packaging costs an integer multiple price increase per unit if biodegradable. Storage requirements would also increase because 60 days is not a long enough shelf lifetime for prosciutto or anything similar
Buying an entire prosciutto costs hundreds of dollars, obviously people don't want to buy a whole one.
It's also usually not heated, by the way. This has zero to do with not liking to prepare meals... most people who buy sliced prosciutto are doing it as part of the meal they're preparing. We're not talking about hot pockets or frozen lasagna here.
That's a lot of food waste. Heck, I sometimes lament that I can't buy smaller amounts of spinach because I hate seeing half the bag go to waste.And I'll add that this has nothing to do with cooking or not cooking: I like to cook, and do so most days.
That packaging keeps food waste down because it breaks things into smaller portions - not to mention that many food places seal them in ways to make them last longer (example being adding a mix of gasses to help it not oxidize).
I prepare my own meal, and I don't need meat to be pre-sliced, but I do need it to be in a small enough portion that can be put into my fridge.
This and a million other small inconveniences hardly seem too great a price to pay to avoid filling the planet's air and water (and by consequence our bodies) with plastic waste
The issue is when the waste gets in to places where it wreaks havoc, like especially waterways.
Currently, afaik, this problem is primarily driven by a few countries in Asia, so I think the effort that would have the most impact is figuring out how to convince those particular Asian countries to stop throwing plastic in to rivers.
And anyone else who gets it in their head to throw plastic in to rivers.
As long as waste is contained properly it doesn’t seem to make so much of a net change in the earth.
The west could start by not exporting a huge portion of its plastic waste to said Asian countries.
> I think this is overblown. The earth is already 'full' of... toxic things.
The earth was certainly not "full" of macro-, micro-, and nano-plastics 50 years ago.
Americans ingest and inhale tens to hundreds of thousands of microplastic particles per year[0]. Microplastics likely impair cognition in hermit crabs[1]. Nanoplastics accumulate in plants[2]. It's not just waterways.
Nobody really understands how this might affect human health. We're all participants in a planet-sized experiment to find out.
[0]: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2020.0030
That's not how it works. Worst-case scenario that winds up in landfills instead of being recycled.
The problem in Asia is 100% domestic, with citizens and households and apartment buildings dumping their local plastic trash on the side of the road, burning it in backyards, dumping it in the river.
It's a problem even if it ends up in landfills. Plastics can leach chemicals into groundwater. My point is that the "Asian countries are responsible for most of the world's pollution" narrative is simplistic and unhelpful. Most of the plastic in the oceans is indeed from Asian countries. But plastic concentrations are 4-20x higher on land than in the oceans. The United States has the highest tapwater contamination rate in the world (94%).
> The problem in Asia is 100% domestic, with citizens and households and apartment buildings dumping their local plastic trash on the side of the road, burning it in backyards, dumping it in the river.
You're of course correct to point out that this happens, but calling the problem 100% domestic is disingenuous.
People are already willing to pay premium for organic and other hard to inspect/certify labels; it doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility that people would be ok buying paper-wrapped prosciutto that has some similar stamp of quality.
But even waxed paper isn't going to prevent the prosciutto from drying out for more than a day or two. The whole point of the plastic that prosciutto is often sold in is to keep it good for months, since it's usually a low-volume item that may sit on the shelf for a couple weeks or more.
The alternative would be more feasible if we had better-designed, walkable cities. But in North America places are built staggered, public transpo sucks.
Not difficult to rotate crops.
I read GP as saying that while an organic product might be produced responsibly, as your family's farms do, it could also be factory-farmed using pesticides worse than Roundup.
If that is true, then the word "organic" is not meaningful for consumers who want to support sustainable, low-impact farming.
https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&SID=9874504b6f1...
I'm not sure what the industry standard for something being a "pesticide" is, but there are clearly plenty of tools organic farms can use for pest control. It would be an undertaking to figure out the potential health and sustainability ramifications of all of them (and of course, the label "organic" could encompass the use of any or all of them).
No problem! We found an aquifer (fossil, non-renewable) in the middle of the desert, we'll pump up the water and irrigate the ground out there where we're far away from pesky neighbors. Of course this is a big operation, so we need big investment, and thus a big company. Also we need workers, since nobody lives out there. We'll bus them in. They'll need a place to stay, so we'll put them in camps.
After my evening yoga I like to have some warm chamomile tea to wind down before bed. I like this one because it's organic and has a haiku on the inside about how we should take care of the planet.
In any global industry there are going to be outliers and people breaking the rules, but suggesting that organic farming destroys soil and uses more harmful chemicals than non-organic farming as a general rule sounds very much like FUD.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/organic-certifica... [2] https://ec.europa.eu/info/food-farming-fisheries/farming/org...
Seems like a solvable problem, but only if we make it harder to pollute; otherwise price will dictate.
They used to seal jellies and jam with wax over the top. Unfortunately, this method made it more likely that you would get food poisoning (and it is still an issue with home canning, but we are a little safer).
Hence the question about if it keeps out microbes and such.
As opposed to an arbitrary tax discourage something I would whole-heartedly support that the cost of all products includes the cost of all externalities.
Maybe people on a budget should wait in the deli line for their prosciutto, or buy something cheaper.
This is a matter of the size of the tax. If a Snickers bar was slapped with a $30 plastic tax, you can be sure Snickers would not come wrapped in plastic tomorrow.
Whenever I bring this up someone inevitably brings up polluted oceans, so I might as well address it now - if you don't throw your plastic bags into the ocean and neither does your local waste management those bags will never make it to the ocean. They will be in the landfill.
The volume of packaged foods in developing nations are comparatively lower but can't imagine the footprint it could cause when those nations also develop into heavily packaged FMCG consuming behemoths.
My wife and I tried this a few years ago for a few weeks, either bringing in our own Tupperware or Mason jars to do it, and each time the person working in the deli area had to get a manager involved, and one time they accused us of stealing their tupperware, since they sold that same container in the shop. We did this partly for environmental reasons, but mostly for "meat packaging gets really stinky in your garbage can after a few days in a small apartment" reasons. After awhile, we decided it wasn't worth the headache to us.
In NYC (and California too I think?), they're starting to encourage bringing your own bag instead of buying them at the register, so I might retry this experiment again.
Next time I go to C-Town or Food Bazaar or something maybe I'll make another effort and try again...there isn't a Whole Foods near me.
That lego set my kid builds for Xmas? It'll be here for thousands of years and Lego is manufacturing billions of bricks each year.
Fungi are great and all but we have a destructive behavior we need to fix. We can't rely on a quick fix or a miracle cure.
People sell Lego by the kilo on ebay etc all the time.
Throw that up on Facebook marketplace or something and people will pay hundreds for it
I probably ought to just donate them like the sibling posters suggest. it's not like I get any use out of them now, but psychologically it's kinda hard to think about just giving away something that was so important to me as a kid to someone I don't know and might not even meet.
Certain things are impossible with only 10,000. Others with 10,000,000. Still other things are impossible with 10 billion.
We want rich, diverse, dynamic and satisfying lives. We do not want a crowded, polluted, impoverished world. 10,000 of us is certainly too few to sustain our civilizational accomplishments. My guess is that the numbers we have now are too many. What is the right-ish number?
Ethically, we would need a pressure great enough to reduce the population for a horrible reason. We would never choose it.
We make policies all the time that affect peoples reproductive decisions. Many of these are, in fact, explicitly about biasing reproductive decisions in one way or another. For example, countries like Poland have introduced policies to increase fertility, monetary incentives to have more children. The purpose of that policy is quite explicit. Other policies discourage people from having more children, including improving access to safe and effective contraception, and either the withdrawal of fertility-increasing tax incentives or enabling people to postpone starting a family (which all by itself can slow or reverse population growth).
Yet, it seems that you only have moral qualms on one side of this coin. But perhaps I judge you too hastily.
That's because we've only been discussing one side of it. There are endless bad things that aren't worth denouncing in a particular conversation, if that conversation isn't about those things.
If food production at some point becomes CO2 neutral you still have a lot of other detrimental effects to the environment from food production to account for. Plastic is a net positive for the environment when it comes to food packaging.
In my opinion, the move should be towards normalising reusable containers (where practical). Where I am, there are some more "specialist" shops who are doing great work in this area, but it's not mainstream and is often more expensive than just going to the supermarket.
Anyway, someone thought I should be thanked with another -1. Can we go to -Infinity ?
But when the tomatoes are loose, we don't call that bulk.
Anyway, we can just say "without packaging."
I personally think that long-life plastics should be illegal for quickly used items.
Glass and wax-cardboard should be our primary packaging methods for food.
It should also be required that all plastics be recycled. I HATE plastic.
Also, look at cars - whats the average lifespan of a car these days - and in all the millions of cars - with thousands of parts made from plastic that never get recycled.