Eldergays: Learn Me Abouts Pre-Plastic Era Packages

Paper bags for the most part. Even meats were wrapped in paper. Fast food was pretty much in paper too. McDonald's first started using the styrofoam containers in the 1970's.

Paper bags are very strong when dry and when double bagged. Unless a carton of milk was leaking, there was almost never a problem.

The BIG advantage of the plastic bags when they were introduced was the handle. That was really new. And useful. Handles on paper bags were always glued on and did not stand up to much weight. They were not a part of regular grocery store paper bags.

As far as wrapping food, paper cartons were made water proof enough with wax. Just like many milk cartons today. It wasn't a problem. And it still isn't. We do NOT need all the plastic and foam packaging grocery retailers currently use. It's insane.

I remember pre-plastic toys. Metal and wood were common. Tonka trucks, Tinkertoys ...

Sorry. I left something out. I'm old.

Food products today are better sealed. Pop off the top of a plastic container of yogurt of cottage cheese, and you find a plastic seal firmly attached to the food container. In the old days, if you lifted the lid of a similar paper and wax container, you got the food. No seal.

The contaminated Tylenol that killed 7 people in Chicago in 1982 changed EVERYTHING when it comes to packaging.

One thing I’ve never understood is the use of “parchment” to wrap things up, which was like a semi stiff waxed paper, kind of like what one would put fish and chips in the US (I don’t think we used old newspaper like in the UK). But my question is how did it get that name, yet be distinguished from actual parchment that is the untanned skins of animals?

There was an art to bagging and some bags had to be supported by the bottom because of weight.

You could cradle a well-stacked bag without crushing the contents.

Replace all your plastic containers with returnable glass and you understand the importance of baggers who packed and carried your shit. Plus, you understand why grocers helped manufacturers offload package recycling onto consumers.

This brings up the demise of one of my favorite objects that has fascinated me since childhood. In the bakery, but I guess they had them in butcher’s too, they would have this device hanging from the ceiling that dispensed twine for tying up packages and boxes. It’s usually that beautiful two tone twine in red and white or blue and white. I always wanted to play with it and was amazed at the dexterity of how quickly they could do that wrapping and tie it off. And how you could even carry the package home by the string. There are only a few old timey bakeries I’ve seen this in anymore.

I guess it came in other colors as well, but I only remember it in blue and red. Did they change it seasonally like yellow and purple around Easter and red and green at Christmas?

Brown paper packages were tied up with string.

My mom made my lunch for school, wrapped sandwiches and other stuff in wax paper. Jarred and bottled things were in glass. Stuff like Devil Dogs were wrapped in cellophane. There was a lot of returning of glass and getting a deposit back for soda. The milkman brought the milk in glass bottles, collected them also. Other things were in waxed cartons (same as now). We had a garbage pail in the ground with a flip lid, the garbage man came to take the pail out and replace it (we didn't throw food out in plastic bags).

Where I live we have paper grocery bags now, to cut down on plastic (town mandated) So it's not that unusual.

What about trash bags? What was used then? It can't be paper bags! There would have been leakage, right?

In our case (in the suburbs) as I said, dry trash and garbage were separated. Dry trash went in trash barrels, with lids, and garbage went in the garbage can. There were no trash bags, as such. I mean you would bring your dry trash out to the barrel in a paper bag, I guess. (I was a little kid, I barely remember this.) There was also a town dump where people brought bigger stuff.

Metal cans for anything being put out for pick up. If you had something really messy, wrap it in paper. Throw it in the can.

But we also burned our own trash. Either in a steel drum, or in a contained made of steel wire that was about the size of a metal trash can. Put your paper in there, burn it. Newspapers. Old mail. Cereal boxes. Burn it all.

Leaves, too. Burn 'em. None of this crap of shoveling endless amounts of leaves into large paper bags for pick up. Rake them into the alley. Burn them. I see the problem with this. A growing population would make the problem even worse. But as a child, I looooooved it whenever a neighbor burned the trash. I was right there to watch.

Picture of in-ground garbage can. The top flipped open, there was a can with a handle inside the container, that the garbage man would collect. (My mom would pour boiling water in there sometimes if she saw maggots.)

I remember my dad raking the leaves and putting them in the gutter, over a sewer grate, to burn. Everybody burned leaves on the street in the fall, you would see smoking piles in front of people's houses. It smelled good. Some people had incinerators in the back yard, though where I lived they weren't common.

Metal trash cans like we all had.

Kids used the covers as cymbals

Shields!

A trash burner.

Leaves went to the curb for pickup with specialized equipment that vacuumed them up.

Newspapers were picked-up separately (non-profits) but you bundles them or put them in grocery bags and put them on top of the trash cans.

Trash bags have been around for a very long time, at least since the 60s.

R17 Oh, yeah, shields! I forgot. That was cool.

My mom lined the kitchen trashcan with newspaper. She shoved the newspaper down each side on a diagonal and one on the bottom. It all slide out when she dumped it into the bigger can outside.

R19 I'm sure plastic trash bags were around, I think they were used by hospitals. But in residences they weren't widely used in the 60s - probably not until the late 70s. Drawstring bags weren't even invented until the mid-80s. I remember being in college in the early 80s, and when packing or bringing laundry home or whatever, never used a plastic bag.

Two quart glass bottles of Pepsi. Don't drop it.

I don't know why and won't speculate, but the first plastic trash bags marketed for home use were much, much, much too thin. It didn't matter what you put in the bag, it would puncture the bag. They were awful. Didn't matter if these were small bags to line a small wastebasket, or large bags for a trash can.

It took a while for them to catch on and to be improved to the point of being usable.

I remember clearly when my family moved from paper bags lining the garbage can to plastic bags. I didn't have to clean out the coffee grinds that would soak through the paper.

Paper in all its thicknesses and permutations (butcher paper, tissue for pastries, cardboard). Produce sections would have small paper bags to put your apples or zucchini in. Some markets are returning to that... in the CA region I live in there are rolls of plastic bags (plant-based "plastic") but also paper bags for produce, or reusable "net" bags.

Before I ever saw Chinese food containers, we would get turtles (now we know steaming with salmonella) at the pet store or the pet section in the Five and Dime and bring them home in those containers. They were practically as exciting as the pet itself with its hinged wire handle. And you could play with it after you put the turtle in one of these.

We also had metal trash cans we sat out for the garbage truck every week, they picked them up by hand and dumped everything and hopefully didn't bang them up to where they weren't usable anymore. We saved paper bags from the grocery store and used them in the kitchen trash can. We really didn't have that many trash cans in the rest of the house except for one small one upstairs and one in the bathroom, and we carried those out to the metal trash cans when they needed to be emptied. By the 1980s dad was putting plastic bags from the grocery store into the small cans so we could just take the bags out and not the entire trash can.

I prefer paper bags these days if I can get them because they are easy to recycle, our recycling company won't take plastic bags.

This Pinterest fraulette has made an end table out of a trash burner basket.

Trash Talk!

[quote]Newspapers were picked-up separately (non-profits) but you bundles them or put them in grocery bags and put them on top of the trash cans.

Oh, I had forgotten all about that, but now I remember dad saving newspapers up until there was a bundle, tying them, then leaving them on top of the trash can.

When we lived in Missouri we were able to legally burn leaves and branches in our back yard in a makeshift barrel stove, but sometimes we had too much so we filled up the back of the pickup truck and drove it to the dump. The garbage trucks wouldn't pick up leaves and I don't believe we had plastic lawn waste bags until the 1980s.

In my jungle, we still make baskets from banana leaves to hold our food as of now!!!

Did anyone else here collect telephone books for school fundraisers. Gawd! On the day the phone books were brought to school, there were thousands of them.

pudding and fruit cups were in metal tins with pull tabs

The mother lode!

(And they can be yours.)

R33 No, but there was a can drive, and in an interior courtyard of the school there would be piles up to four to five feet deep of them by the end of the year.

School paper drives. You'd save piles of old newspapers in the garage for months waiting for the next one.

Paper and string.

“Paper drive! Paper drive! Put your newspapers on the curb!”

One wonders where they even got all those, r35.

Sometimes berries were in straw baskets wrapped in cellophane, rather than plastic containers. Sad-looking tomatoes used to come in packages of 3, wrapped in cellophane. The container was plastic, like a wire mesh. A LOT more foods were in cans than there are now. We lived on canned vegetables in the off season.

What did you gays do about all the gerbils you would buy? They could just chew through paper and cardboard? Did you, you know, just handle it at time of purchase?

To make this multicultural, one of the most interesting and beautiful solutions to packaging was the Plains Indians creation of Parfleches, which were basically rawhide envelopes that folded up and were painted with intricate designs.they could store anything in them, but here’s a word you haven’t heard since fourth grade, pemmican was a usual thing carried in them.

R42, cages were a thing. Metal has been around a long time, silly.

I’ve never been to Japan, but I’m fascinated by this and tried it myself once to not very good results.

For bread and other bakery items, paper remains the wrapping material of choice. Use plastic and the crispiness goes.

r7 There was a bakery in CC Philadelphia(Rindelaub's) and they had a cotton string-tying machine. You placed the filled box in the middle of a special platform, pressed a button, and a curved metal arm swung completely around the box, neatly tying a knot, then snipping the string. You then turned the box 90º and repeated the process, to get a cross-tie. Presented it to the customer and off they went. Took less than 15 seconds.

I remember 'butcher paper' sometimes called 'peach' paper(still used), due to its color(sort of) Thin and parchment-y. There was also the wax-coated on one side, slightly-yellowish meat paper(it was called 'gardenia paper', again, from the color) as well(this was thicker and more parchment-y and was always the outer wrapping) Meats in the case at grocery stores were in pressed cardboard trays, wrapped in cellophane, done laboriously one at a time(unlike the automatic feed wrappers of today) The cellophane was precut in various sizes, and had a special coating on one side that went next to the food. While you were wrapping, if you forgot which side was which, you touched the cellophane to your lip and the side that stuck was the coated side.

Paper bags, of course, the only thing BITD. The grocery stores also used to put their empty cardboard boxes up front, near the registers, for customers to use in transporting their purchases. This changed when companies realized their was money to be made in selling their clean cardboard to a paper processor. Initially, it was tied up with stout twine, sometimes in the big boxes, since emptied, that toilet paper came in. Now they have special machines(balers) which can handle a couple hundred pounds of cardboard, ultimately secured with metal wires.

Greasy cheesesteaks, dripping wet roast pork sandwiches, hoagies etc. wrapped up with the same sort of paper that newspapers were printed on(still done today). Everything leaked. Pizza boxes were flimsy and very bend-y. Corrugated ones came later. Always liked the stout, plain white cardboard cups with lids that luncheonettes would put coffee or soups into. Very butch. Styrofoam is NOT butch.

We had trash pick-up once a week, but garbage was collected twice. Local pig farmers would come get it to augment their animals' food supply. No matter how tight fitting the lid on the can was, inevitably flies would get in and maggots abounded. Yeesh!

The local produce store(Mike's) wrapped all manner of greens in old newspapers. Eggs were put into small brown paper bags.

There was a much-revered(she must've been because everyone referred to her as Donna Rosa) woman who I always remember burning leaves. She'd amass a pile of leaves, burn them, then when the fire was out, swept up the ashes and put them in a metal trash can.

R47 Yes, thanks for sharing about the machines in bakeries, I remember them too, and I guess they are still a thing, here’s a video of them being used with a contemporary machine. I grew up in PA too, near Harrisburg.

Wax paper and wax paper bags were used for lunches, which fit inside a brown paper bag. Grocery bags went straight to the car trunk or to one of those old lady wire carts or to a brown paper shopping bag if you were walking. Everyone wanted their groceries double-bagged. No recollection of what produce was wrapped with but produce sections were smaller and less lush pre-nafta and other global trade arrangements. The selection was seasonal. All our trash cans and wastebaskets had liners of some sort. Very often the trash went into those brown paper bags and then into the metal cans. We avoided plastic; we recycled paper; we ate seasonally; and we repaired appliances like toasters and radios.

What happened? The Republicans, deregulation and greed.

Also China, which made goods available at much cheaper prices, spawning fast fashion and disposable everything.

I'm a Democrat but Clinton signed Nafta into law

I remember seeing some slices of bologna being wrapped up in pink butcher paper (my mom and me at the counter). I was really little and the memory is vague. It was a small grocery store. A few years later, supermarkets started opening and that was the end of the that little store.

I do remember the metal trash cans. The garbage pickup was early in the morning and the metal sounds were loud.

My area where I live now is back to paper bags, no plastic except for produce departments. I reuse my paper bags over and over.

The insane amount of plastic that's been introduced into our environment has been so harmful. Plastic bags and other plastics are endrocrine disrupters.

I don't know if my dad burning trash was terribly healthy or safe, either, but he usually stuck to paper and cardboard.

I also remember the local dairy bringing glass bottles of milk, which they'd set in a metal container on your front porch.

They picked up the empties, too.

Let's face it, people enjoy burning trash. I've never done it, but I would imagine it's fun and satisfying.

Someday: “Eldergays. Tell us about plastic.”

I found a bill in my mom's cookbook for the dairy in 1960. It was an order form, that the milkman added up in pencil. 2 quarts of milk and a pint of cream. It was so weird finding that. Even had the old-fashioned phone exchange on it, with the two letters at the beginning.

R29 That's a great name for this particular suburban subspecies.

Pinterest Fraulette.

That aluminum box on the kitchen porch was insulated so it could be used for ice cream and butter as well as milk.

I wonder how good that ice cream (that you could order along with your milk, etc.). I'm guessing it was vanilla ice cream.

John Bickerson) And don't get me started on those awful lunches you make me

Blanche Bickerson) I haven't made you lunch in years

John) Don't give me that, every morning I see my lunch wrapped up on the counter in brown paper

Blanche) That's the garbage

No, it was neapolitan. Always neapolitan so everyone could be kept happy.

The insane amount of plastic has been upped by online ordering. e.g. I just bought two simple sleepmasks from Amazon. Each came in separate plastic containers, and these were sealed in another huge heat sealed plastic envelope, that was then in another cardboard envelope. The wastage for two tiddly items was astounding. Multiply that by XXXX, and no wonder fish are full of plastic, and we're all gonna die.

Neapolitan? Ewwww! The chocolate touches the strawberry and the strawberry touches the vanilla.

That's all so wrong.

Before the era of plastic clamshell containers, you would buy your harvest fruits and vegetables in woven wooden baskets. Every fall, the public schools would hold a basket drive.

R64 The alternative is kids fighting over whether to order a carton of strawberry or vanilla or chocolate. Chocolate will always win out if it's all-or-nothing but there'll be at least one strawberry lover who'll pout for the rest of the day.

I miss the glass pint bottles of booze with the tax stamp wrapper.

Our milk box was wooden with a metal liner, and was provided by the dairy. You put the clean empty bottles back in the box, and the dairy sanitized and refilled them. Some of the bottles looked pretty beat up. The bottles were sealed with little paper caps.

A loaf of bread came in a waxy paper inner sleeve, with a cellophane outer sleeve. A big innovation was when they added a sticky label at one end, that you could peel off and use to seal up the cellophane after opening. They’d lose their stickiness before you used up the loaf.

Groceries were carried home in paper bags. There was an art to packing paper bags. After all the items are placed inside, you should be able to cut away the paper, and the items will remain neatly stacked. There used to be grocery-bagging competitions, and David Letterman (who had been a bagger) used to have the winner on on his show, and they’d demonstrate their skill.

My state just outlawed single-use plastic bags, so the grocery stores have gone back to paper. So far so good, I haven't had one tear on me. They seem pretty strong. They also wrap fish and meat in paper, but I think it’s coated with plastic instead of wax.

We used to burn our leaves in the street. Of course very bad for the air, but what a heavenly smell. 🍁 🔥

R67–Do they put liquor in plastic bottles now? That doesn’t seem healthy.

r61 I LOVE The Bickersons!

I remember dropping a glass bottle/jug of bleach and ruining a pair of bluejeans.

There was a meme or joke or whatever going around a few years ago where a teen grocery clerk was lecturing an elderly woman about not recycling properly and how the elderly just doesn’t care. The elderly woman responds with a laundry list things covered in this thread: glass milk bottles, paper bags, glass storage etc etc. it was kinda cheesy but spot on.

[quote] No, it was neapolitan. Always neapolitan so everyone could be kept happy.

Not sure how strawberry was ever seen as a good idea. Half-chocolate / half-vanilla would have been better.

Ebony and Ivory you could call it.

Sometimes it was called Van-Choc-Straw.

We didn't burn trash, just lawn debris. It was nice, it smelled like fall. I don't know of anyone who was allowed to burn trash and I remember getting scolded when I put cardboard into the barrel because it didn't belong.

Up until a couple of years ago, someone in my neighborhood burned their trash. Don’t know which house it was, or if they did it in a barrel or their fireplace, but man does burning trash stink.

It's funny the Publix stores on delivery are now using paper bags. I just burn them in the fireplace.

We had a special incinerator in the basement of our 1930s 4 square. When my dad was alive until 1980, he used it regularly. My Mom had it taken out when she got a new furnace. I now live i. A rural area and the neighbors and my husband still burn garbage although in big metal barells. I hate this as it seems incrediably dangerous in a neighborhood of Victorians and woods in the back.

Where do you people live that they still allow burning? I guess you don't have air quality issues.

OP! Learn me?

Oh DEAR!

My grandfather burned trash in a barrel in the back yard. In [italic]Blue Gardenia[/italic], the ladies burned their trash in a special incinerator in the backyard which, at first, I thought was some sort of food grill.

The produce section at the A&P employed a lady who weighed your produce for you. She'd put it in a paper bag and write the price on the bag with a wax pencil or a marker.

Coffee came in cans that were used to store things once empty. The A&P (again) had a coffee grinder that dispensed ground coffee into a paper bag. That was back in the 60s. Later in the 70s when fancy coffees could be found in specialty stores, those again were dispensed into paper bags that could be sealed. I don't know who came up with the plastic bags most coffee comes in now, but they're ridiculous.

Cheese came sealed in red wax with labels stuck on the outside.

And, believe it or not, shampoo came in glass bottles.

[quote]Cheese came sealed in red wax with labels stuck on the outside.

My local Hy-Vee carries Red Dragon Cheese and it comes sealed in red wax!

Crisco and coffee came in cans with keys attached that were used to open them by twisting off a strip of metal. Great fun for a kid!

^^^ Don’t forget sardines too!

The metal curlicue produced by opening the can often got spray painted and ended up on the Christmas tree.

I still have a large scar on my palm from cutting it on one of those metal coffee cans with the key opener that was being used as a planter. I was three at the time, but 65 years later, the scar is still very noticeable.

r86 and canned hams!