Last night, I was tidying up the kitchen after the depredation of my children when I caught myself behaving like a member of the dust-bowl Joad family — or like some other quaint remnant from that long-ago time when Americans husbanded their resources, hoarded their scraps and sought to make a use of every discarded thing.
There I was, scooping sheaves of graded homework across the countertop and into the garbage without a qualm. Handfuls of free-range, hormone-free eggshells went in with them, plus rice and sauce scraped from innumerable dishes. Out went a handful of colored markers that had long since lost their caps and dried out. And then I encountered a little heap of fresh banana peels.
“Oh!” came an inward prod from some vestigial Depression-era consciousness. “Mustn’t waste them. Must enrich the soil.” So I took a pair of shears, carefully cut the banana peels to ribbons, carried them outdoors and shook them out over the scraggly rosebushes in front of our house.
This may not sound like a radical experience. I fear it may sound rather silly; certainly, in my part of suburban Washington, everyone is so right-on they’ve been composting steadily since the ’70s.
But what gave me the Joad-like jab was to realize that out of all habit and character, I’d suddenly behaved like my grandparents. When my Connecticut grandfather died in the early 1980s, an entire room in his basement had been given over to the storage of beautifully clean and eminently useful milk cartons.
He had also retained many handy-sized yogurt tubs, with lids, in case someone needed to store something. In his case, it wasn’t that the Depression had so seared him; as a schoolteacher he worked steadily and in fact bought a car in the depths of the national gloom. But he couldn’t abide waste — and it wasn’t that long ago that most of his countrymen felt the same.
Thrift signified that generation, all over the world. A Canadian friend told me her English grandmother used to rip open cereal boxes and use them to line her counters so that she always had a clean cardboard surface on which to chop onions. Naturally, she only threw the cardboard out when it was utterly sodden. This woman also saved pasta water to starch her linens.
My South African grandmother, who lived in Ireland in the second half of her life (and who taught me the trick of feeding banana skins to roses), was a tyrant about paper napkins. She insisted that guests choose a decorative ring and use their napkins repeatedly, often for days.
As an ambassador from the vigorous American consumer economy, I found this practice not just icky, but absurd. Paper napkins were laughably inexpensive. Why not use a fresh one each time?
Thus many of us grew up silently vowing to repudiate in our own adulthood the parsimonious mending, odd-bit saving and relentless cheese-paring of the people who raised our parents.
Their actions didn’t seem virtuous. They were eccentricities of the elderly, hangover behaviors from the days before a glorious panoply of cheap Chinese products made it more expensive to have old objects repaired than to fling them out and buy shiny new ones.
And why should we eat everything on our plates, anyway? Food is dirt cheap! The late 20th century was the first time in American history that children really didn’t have to eat their crusts.
And yet —
According to the public radio show “Marketplace,” we’ve even out sourced our recycling to China. In a superb series this week about consumer profligacy, the program explained that container ships that travel to the U.S. laden with big-box goodies often travel back to China loaded with piles of used cardboard. That material then gets chewed up, churned out and made into more big-box packaging … for the next load destined for our shores.
You don’t have to be especially “green” or a hoarder of milk cartons to find something rather distasteful, even oafish, about buying and then chucking out so much — just because we can.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal.
