No Plastique in Paris

It's back, the plastic we loath has returned. First it was bottles, rows and rows of bottles, and all the bottle accouterments, filling the top rack in the dishwasher. Next came the truly awful sippy cups. As if the plastic wasn't bad enough, most came adorned with some caricature that in no way contributed to the functionality of the sippy cup. And as a note, sippy? Really? We want our children to be intelligent and yet we freely use a word like sippy?

And now, after a few short yet blissful plastic free years we are here, plastic lunch box components. The thought of tossing away a gazillion plastic bags annually horrifies me so I went with the less awful option, plastic containers of different shapes and sizes, to be reused daily and eventually recycled. But they must be cleaned, and so now our dishwasher, so briefly free of plastic, is full each day with red and yellow and green boxes, and their matching lids.

The real problem, aside from the unsightly nature of plastic, and the feel that it just is never really clean, is that our dishwasher does not dry plastic. It refuses. This machine that requires not one thing to be wiped clean before it is loaded, the same one that just might polish the silver if I were to find the right button, does not dry plastic. It looks nice, it's sleek and snappy and it does just a stellar job with all our other dirty items, but the pricey European dishwasher has a thing against plastic, and I just can't blame it.

This leads me to believe that Europeans simply do not use plastic, certainly not to the extent that Americans do. We have embraced plastic, I believe if it was possible we would all live in plastic houses, or at least families with children would, and to some extent we do; have you seen the amount of plastic gifted to people with small children? It's all brightly colored and unattractive, but it's easy to clean, hooray!

Or possibly school children in France are offered lunch choices that do not make their parents recoil in terror. Here's an example of lunch offered recently in a suburban Paris school district: cucumbers with garlic and fine herbs, Basque chicken thigh with herbs, red and green bell peppers and olive oil, couscous, organic yogurt and an apple. And here is an example of what was recently offered at Mary and Kate's school: nachos, Tony's sausage pizza, cheesy mac with turkey ham, green beans, diced peaches and animal crackers. School children in France are given at least 30 minutes for lunch, as compared to the 20 minutes allotted at our school. In that 20 minutes the kindergartners must walk to the lunchroom, go through the lunch line, wait again for milk, and then spend the remaining time inhaling the choices they have made, or the food I have packed. It appears that lunch in France is offered as part of the education, not just a quick refueling session to keep children awake in the afternoon.

And so, despite our tres chic European brand dishwasher, we still live in the land of Kenmore appliances. The children find, in their lunch boxes each day, small plastic containers full of modified American lunch staples while I, at the end of each day stand drying the horrid things, cursing the American school lunch program, and the smug dishwasher who knows it doesn't have to be this way.