Tag: Grocery Stores

Where the Magic Happens

 

Ever since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued guidance on May 13 of this year that people fully vaccinated against COVID-19 no longer need to wear masks in most indoor settings, while unvaccinated people should continue to wear masks, a magical thing has happened in this country, and that is the huge increase in vaccination rates everywhere, as evidenced by how few people are still wearing masks indoors in any setting. Before May 13, the fully vaccinated percentage of the population stood at about 35 percent; after May 13, it appears that percentage leapt to upwards of 70 percent. Incredible! Herd immunity achieved overnight!

2021-05-20 19 47 02 A sign describing new mask-social distancing-vaccination requirements at the Walmart in Chantilly, Fairfax County, Virginia
A sign regarding mask policy at a Walmart in Chantilly, Virginia, on May 20, 2021, shortly after the CDC issued new guidelines. Note how the wording does not require unvaccinated customers to wear a mask as a condition of entering the store. Photo by Famartin.

 

It’s heartening to look around at fellow citizens in shops, grocery stores, and restaurants and assess by an eyeball estimate that even more than 70 percent of adults appear to be fully vaccinated. In some places around the country, the number of fully vaccinated adults could even be as high as 90 percent, based on visual estimates. What’s holding the vaccination numbers back for the total population is the lack of a vaccine suitable for children under 12. In some shops, young children are almost the only ones wearing masks.

The CDC has statistics putting the nationwide percentage of fully vaccinated people at about 50 percent as of late July. Fake news! Anyone can waltz into their local big box store, where signs at the entrance clearly advise unvaccinated customers to don masks before entering, and see with their own eyes that the CDC’s numbers don’t tell the whole story. The CDC must be gathering data from people outside of stores, or even from ones who never set foot indoors at a public venue. Since the CDC is obviously part of the Deep State, their numbers are not to be trusted by honest Americans.

 

It’s the honor system in operation, see, and since Americans are honorable people, they would never falsely represent their vaccination status in order to satisfy their own selfish whims and perverse ideas, not when behaving that way could endanger their fellow Americans, among them the honestly unvaccinated, such as young children and those who are immunocompromised. No, when it comes to weighing the evidence of one’s eyes and belief in the honorability of fellow Americans against the statistical mumbo jumbo disseminated by a cabal of Deep State scientists at the CDC, the scales definitely tilt toward siding with all the American patriots cruising maskless down the aisles of Walmart and Costco.

Supermarket social distancing signs
Supermarket social distancing signs in Ireland in August 2020. Follow the blue sign floor tiles! Photo by Ear-phone.

According to the CDC, as of July 25, 2021 the percentage of Americans fully vaccinated against COVID-19 was 49.1 percent. That’s an increase of only about 14 percent since May 13, 2021. Herd immunity won’t be reached until the percentage of fully vaccinated is over 70 percent. Considering how vaccination rates have been slowing, it’s unlikely Americans will achieve herd immunity before the onset of cold weather forces more activities back indoors for the winter.

Judy Garland as Dorothy in the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming. In Kansas, the state Dorothy called home, the COVID-19 vaccination rate is 44.9 percent, 4.2 percentage points below the national average. In a land of alternative facts somewhere over the rainbow, the vaccination rate is much higher – away above the chimney tops, in fact.

Absent widespread vaccine mandates, it could be that a vaccination rate of about 65 percent will be a limit past which we cannot move due to the political and cultural divisions in the country, as honorable American snowflakes dig in their heels like recalcitrant children and refuse to become socialist tools by doing the right thing for others, even passing up bribes from state and local governments. They may kill themselves for the puerile satisfaction of owning the libs, and so be it, but in the meantime they will serve as incubators for new, possibly more dangerous coronavirus variants, and they will spread their affliction to everyone else, even within the magical realm past shop doors.
— Ed.



Rest in Peace, Israel Kamakawiwo’ole.

 

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Under the Fig Tree

 

Figs are ripening now all across the southern United States, and by September the figs in the northern half of the country will ripen. If a gardener has 20 to 30 square feet to spare outside, preferably in a sunny spot protected from cold winter winds, then planting a fig tree would be a productive use of that space. For the gardener who doesn’t have enough outdoor space, then planting a dwarf fig tree in a pot and setting it by a sunny window is a great way to get plenty of fruits (technically a fig is not a fruit, but a fleshy stem with multiple ingrown flowers), and without a great deal of fuss over pests, diseases, and special requirements.

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A squirrel nibbling a fig in the Bodhi Tree at the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya, Bihar state, India. Photo by Flickr user Anandajoti.

 

A self-pollinating dwarf fig variety does not require a tiny wasp to pollinate it, unlike varieties such as Smyrna figs. Contrary to common belief, most figs commercially available these days, either as fresh or dried fruits in grocery stores, or as plants for sale to home gardeners, are self-pollinating varieties and therefore it is unlikely consumers will eat a tiny, imprisoned wasp in a fig. Even if they did, there’s no harm in it, and anyway the enzymes produced by the ripening fig will have dissolved the wasp by the time the fig is ready for consumption. That delicate crunchiness inside any ripe fig generally comes from the seeds, and rarely from an insect exoskeleton.

In growing figs outdoors, southern gardeners have a big advantage over northern gardeners because they have to do relatively little to protect their trees from winter cold. Wrapping the branches in burlap and perhaps adding a layer of mulch around the roots are all that is required in the South. There will be some branch die back even so in an average winter, but usually nothing like the major losses incurred by fig trees in the North unless gardeners lay the trees down in trenches and pile mulch and wind protection on top of them.


For a 2017 album, Blakey Morton performed Scott Joplin’s 1908 song “Fig Leaf Rag”.

 

Once a fig tree has established a vigorous root system over the course of five to ten years it can withstand die back of the entire above ground portion and still bounce back in the spring with enough new growth to produce fruit later in the summer. But the difficulty in the North is that without sufficient winter protection the roots themselves may die, and of course that is the end of the tree. Italian immigrants to the northeastern part of the country deemed the extra work worthwhile for the sweet figs they could pluck off their own trees at the end of summer, and they introduced the practice of laying the trees down in winter when they first started arriving in this country in the late nineteenth century. The people of this country, almost all descendants of immigrants themselves, can surely appreciate the sweet taste of the fig along with its rich lore and its association with other immigrants and their generous sharing of knowledge; and since a fig is much more in cultures around the world than a simple fruit, perhaps the people of this country of immigrants can even find enlightenment under the fig tree, wherever it grows.
— Izzy

 

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A Purple Haze of Legal Uncertainty

 

Cannabidiol (CBD) oil has been showing up on the shelves of pharmacies, grocery stores, and health food outlets around the country over the past few years, and yet there remains some confusion about the legality of the product. CBD oil is derived from the Cannabis sativa plant, the same plant that produces hemp and hemp-derived products, as well as marijuana and all its psychoactive derivatives. The difference between hemp and marijuana is in the strain, or variety, with plants bred for hemp production being much lower in the psychoactive property of marijuana known as tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). CBD oil is typically very low in THC, often less than 0.03%, sometimes 0%, and the easiest way for manufacturers to keep THC content low in their CBD oil is to produce it from hemp plants, which are naturally deficient in THC but flush with cannabidiol.

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Cannabis sativa plants growing in the Botanical Garden at Karlsruhe, Germany, in August 2009. Photo by H. Zell.

 

Many users and manufacturers have been touting the benefits of CBD oil for treating epileptic seizures, inflammation, and arthritic conditions, among other conditions. People are eager to use the product, but the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has been holding up progress because they classify anything even remotely connected with marijuana as a controlled substance, and therefore illegal. The DEA has rules defining what is marijuana and what is not which are byzantine in their complexity and which can conveniently be applied at their discretion. Meanwhile, states have been passing laws, not just rules, related to marijuana and hemp products, and some of those laws contradict DEA rules. Do the mere guidelines of a federal agency supersede state laws? In a manner of speaking, that’s no way to run a railroad.

Congress needs to pass legislation restricting the reach of the DEA so that it is not constantly in conflict with state laws and causing confusion among the citizenry. Like any bureaucratic agency, the DEA will fight to maintain its budget and its relevance. Congress must drastically curtail the DEA’s mission, however, because the agency has long overstayed its welcome as society has moved on. Over the long term, the DEA and the regulations it enforces have had the same deleterious effect on society as Prohibition and Prohibition agents in the early twentieth century. The peculiar thing about the foggy legal status of CBD oil caused by the DEA standing in the way of progress the states are trying to make is that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is having a difficult time regulating the CBD oil market because of its status in limbo. Any policy that continues on the books after it has lost the support of the populace needs to be eliminated before it becomes subject to abuse by an irrelevant agency seeking to hold onto power using selective enforcement on behalf of its own entrenched bureaucratic interests and those of powerful pharmaceutical companies.
— Izzy

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Male flowers of a Cannabis sativa plant growing in the Botanical Garden at Karlsruhe, Germany, in August 2009. Photo by H. Zell.

 

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Far from Home Cooking

 

Some of the processed food for sale at grocery stores and restaurants purports to be like home cooking, and other processed foods make a name for themselves by advertising their intention to go beyond what’s available from home cooking. The Doritos Locos Taco from the fast food restaurant Taco Bell, and the Double Down Chicken Sandwich from Kentucky Fried Chicken are advertised as so different and so unlike what home cooks could easily whip up that to get the full experience at a decent price consumers might as well visit the restaurants and order those items because it’s easier than trying to duplicate them at home.

 

Mina Van Winkle, head of the Lecture Bureau of the U.S. Food Administration, explains Victory gardening and food processing to support the war effort LCCN2016650259
This 1917 photograph depicts Mina Van Winkle, head of the Lecture Bureau of the U.S. Food Administration during World War I, explaining Victory gardening and food processing to support the war effort. Photo from the Library of Congress.

When processed food first became widely available to American consumers in the period between the two world wars, the aim of the purveyors was to assure consumers the products were as good as home made and perfectly safe. There was no specific attempt to manufacture exotic foodstuffs, though from the start convenience was a selling point. The trend continued after World War II, with refinements learned by manufacturers in producing canned foods like Spam on a massive scale for service members overseas. Food processors marketed TV dinners in the 1950s with assurances of quality and convenience, not with any idea that they were different or better than what a home cook could produce given the time and inclination.

STAY ON THE JOB. PROCESSED FOOD IS AMMUNITION - NARA - 515482
World War II poster from the Office for Emergency Management of the Office of War Information.

It was in the post World War II years that fast food operations, some of them, like Kentucky Fried Chicken, with beginnings in the years before the war, really began taking off in popularity, expanding across the landscape along with the newly built interstate highway system. Their offerings were traditional, and like the processed convenience foods for sale at supermarkets they mainly stressed the convenience of their food and that it was as good as homemade. It was for pricier restaurants to claim their food was better and fancier than homemade. Consumers visiting fast food establishments mainly wanted assurance the food was cheap, fast, safe, and of a quality on a par with homemade.

"YOU TOO ARE NEEDED IN A WAR JOB. WORK IN A FOOD PROCESSING PLANT." - NARA - 516235
World War II poster from the Office for Emergency Management of the Office of War Information.

In the past 20 years all that has begun to change as consumers have drifted away from cooking the majority of their meals from scratch themselves to either resorting to convenience foods from the supermarket or eating out. The emphasis has changed in the marketing of supermarket convenience foods and fast food restaurant offerings from nearly apologetic claims that they are as good as homemade to stating that they are beyond that and are now in varying degrees gourmet, healthy, exotic, and even comparable with fancy restaurant food at half the price. Their claims are not all hyperbole, and for the most part a well-made TV dinner of today tastes better and is a better value than a comparable TV dinner of 30 or 40 years ago. Food scientists and technologists have indeed done wonders.
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A typical TV dinner of the post World War II era. Photo provided by Smile Lee.

The question remains, however, whether consumers are any better off or healthier for having largely abandoned home cooking in the first place. Yes, the taste and quality and variety of convenience foods from the supermarket and fast foods from inexpensive restaurants have never been better, but at the same time people have never been fatter, with all the health problems that come with being not just overweight, but obese. It seems there’s a hidden price to all the convenience and deliciousness whipped up by food scientists in the labs of giant food companies like Nestlé and Yum! Brands (owners of Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants, among others). That’s something worth pondering the next time you’re shopping the frozen food aisle of the supermarket or cruising a commercial strip for a fast food outlet for your next meal – whether the exotic, fancy dishes they’re offering at low prices are really as good a value as they want them to appear to be, with their mile long list of indecipherable ingredients and unrealistically slight portion amounts, which make their salt, sugar, and fat percentages look more reasonable than they really are. No one but the rich can get away with eating fancy, rich foods every day, because they have the money for all the doctors and health spas it takes to balance out an indulgent lifestyle. They’re not eating the cheap, ersatz stuff anyway.
— Techly

 

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Name Your Price

 

Now that Christmas is past, shoppers will be out looking for bargains as retailers slash prices in an attempt to clear inventory off their books before the end of the year. That brings up the subject of pricing, which beyond the obvious need to cover costs and generate profits, leaves some leeway in the ongoing, never ending psychological games between sellers and buyers.

 

Why $9.99 instead of $10.00? What about the typesetting of that $9.99? Is $9.99 better? How about 9.99, dropping entirely the suggestion that the seller is asking for real money from the buyer? Gas stations price fuel at even finer increments, using tenths of a cent, such as $2.299/10 per gallon. These pricing systems seem like they have been around forever, and it’s surprising to learn they are no older than 150 years, and in the case of gasoline pricing no older than the 1920s or 1930s.

1894 - Koch & Shankweiler Newspaper Ad2 Allentown PA
An 1894 newspaper advertisement for Koch & Shankweiler clothiers in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The fractional pricing is almost all in quarter dollar increments.

Retailers started pricing items at fractions of a dollar rather than rounding the price to the nearest dollar in the late nineteenth century partly in response to inflation which raised their costs past one dollar for many things, and partly to convey to shoppers that they were getting a bargain. When inflation raised the cost of most items in a department store past a dollar, some retailers responded by rounding up the price to the consumer to the next dollar, while others retained fractions in their pricing. Eventually the retailers who retained fractions found they sold more than the retailers who rounded up, and the same principle applied to items within their own stores where they tried the different tactics. For reasons that psychologists and sellers dispute to this day, buyers like fractions of a dollar in pricing, and they respond by purchasing those items over the ones that are priced at rounded dollars, even though those prices may be only one cent higher.

Vintage Radio Advertising - Crosley Radio, "Crosely Again Lowers Prices", "Big Reduction in Famous Trirdyn and Other Radios", From the Literary Digest, January 17, 1925 (9700961943)
A Crosley Radio advertisement in a 1925 edition of The Literary Digest. Prices were at whole dollars or at half dollar fractions, underscoring how even in the early twentieth century fractional pricing was uncommon. Photo from Flickr user Joe Haupt.

At first retailers thought fractional pricing attracted bargain shoppers, and therefore they used the tactic principally for sale items. By the 1920s, however, fractional pricing became commonplace throughout retail marketing, regardless of whether items were on sale or not. The one area where sellers rarely use fractional pricing is for high profile, luxury items, presumably because those shoppers look down on bargain hunting, and because at a certain high dollar amount adding a fraction to the end of the price becomes ludicrous. The only aspect that needed fine tuning was the exact fraction that worked best as a compromise for sellers and buyers. It appears that fractions in the ninetieth percentile have worked best, which is why prices at half dollar fractions, which were once popular, are rarer now than they once were.

As for gas stations’ pricing fuel down to tenths of a cent, that practice dates to the 1920s and 1930s when government entities first started taxing gasoline to raise money for road building and maintenance. The government taxed the fuel sellers, and the sellers passed the cost on to consumers. When gasoline cost ten or fifteen cents per gallon as it did in those times, it made sense to fine tune fractional pricing down to tenths of a cent. The business of selling gasoline retail has always run on slim margins, which is why those businesses have always diversified, first by offering automobile mechanical services, and now more commonly by selling convenience items at a high markup. Gasoline retailers have learned that consumers will drive a mile down the road to save a penny a gallon on fuel, and since the gasoline on offer is essentially a loss leader for the higher priced items the retailer sells, it makes sense even in these times of fuel prices in the range of dollars for retailers to retain the tenth of a cent fractional pricing that could make the difference in their profitability from month to month.

The 1980 comedy Used Cars, directed by Robert Zemeckis, included this television advertisement for one way of dealing with high prices. Note that the Mercedes luxury car price is rounded to $24,000. Warning: foul language.

The latest development in the continuing tug of war between sellers and buyers that deserves mention is the one in which grocers have challenged the math skills of shoppers beyond simply rounding fractions off to the nearest dollar by posing more complicated division skills, such as 4/10.00, 5/12.50, or 10/16.90. These are not terribly difficult math problems, and many people would not need a calculator to figure them out. This pricing ploy is instead an attempt by the retailer to get the consumer to buy more of the item not only by suggesting it is a great value, but also by confusion over what the price is per unit.

Particularly when the consumer has to compare one item priced in such a manner to a similar item priced in the same way, the laziness and confusion of the shopper works to the advantage of the retailer. In that case, even buyers who do not have a calculator with them should take comfort in understanding that by law in most places they do not have to pick up the suggested amount in order to take advantage of the advertised price. A “Buy one, bet one free” promotion, for example, does not necessarily require the shopper to pick up two items in order to receive the benefit of buying only one item at half price. As always, however, caveat emptor – buyer beware – and check with the store manager to be sure of the applicable policy.
― Vita

 

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The Top Banana

 

Since the loss of most of the Gros Michel, or Big Mike, banana plantations due to a destructive root rot by the middle of the twentieth century, the Cavendish has taken over as the most productive banana variety worldwide. By all accounts the Gros Michel was a more flavorful variety than the Cavendish, but growers who wanted to continue producing on a vast scale for the international market had no choice but to switch after fungus reduced the productivity of Gros Michel to an uneconomical level. Now the Cavendish faces similar destruction from another strain of the same fungus, and agronomists are scrambling to find a replacement for the Cavendish.

The Cavendish banana, like the Gros Michel, is a clone. One plant of Cavendish is exactly like the next plant of Cavendish. Such a monoculture is extremely susceptible to pest and disease problems because it cannot adapt through genetic accidents brought about by sexual reproduction. It’s a stationary target. Growers could turn to the extraordinary variety of other, sexually reproduced bananas, and they do just that locally in the tropical areas of the world where bananas grow. The problem for growers who sell internationally has always been finding disease and pest resistant varieties that would hold up under less than ideal shipping conditions and still be economically viable on a large scale.

The first in a series of animated commercials produced by the United Fruit Company in the 1940s for display in movie theaters. The singer was Monica Lewis.
Bananas naturally contain numerous large, hard seeds, making eating them a challenge. It is easier to comprehend the relationship of bananas to berries when confronted with all those seeds. Besides being unavoidable to banana eaters, the seeds were also viable. Modern commercial varieties like the Cavendish have been bred to have seeds that are barely noticeable, turning those varieties into convenience foods. Peel, eat, and don’t worry about the seeds. In the process of hybridizing banana varieties for less inconvenient seeds, agronomists also rendered the seeds unviable. The Cavendish, like the Gros Michel before it, reproduces only exact replicas of itself from parts of an existing plant, without benefit of differing input from any close relatives.


Reliably predictable results are great news for economic giants in any sphere, and agriculture is no exception. The American agribusinesses United Fruit and Standard Fruit, which eventually morphed into Chiquita and Dole, respectively, built themselves into indomitable international forces largely on the predictability of first the Gros Michel and then the Cavendish. They became enormously powerful, vertically integrated corporations that controlled the internal politics of many Latin American countries – the so-called banana republics – and pulled the strings of the United States’ foreign policy. All so that people in wealthy, temperate zone countries could enjoy a fruit that grew only in the tropics.

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It is possible to buy bananas in the U.S. that have been grown in a more ethically sound and environmentally friendly manner than those produced by the huge international companies, but expect to pay a premium. Photo by Axxis10.

Unlike the spice trade, which also dealt in commodities that mostly grew in the tropics, bananas were and are a superfluous item in the diets of people outside the tropics. Spices were valued in the days before refrigeration on account of their utility in preserving other foods or making them more palatable. Bananas are high in potassium, an essential mineral, but so are potatoes and beans, both of which grow well in temperate zones, as well as being available for winter eating due to their good storage qualities. Bananas sold in temperate zone countries are luxury items available at affordable prices due to the ability of powerful international corporations to exploit cheap labor in tropical countries for growing a dependable crop capable of surviving shipment halfway around the world and arriving in salable condition.

The economic model developed by United Fruit and Standard Fruit in the early twentieth century has been copied and adapted ever since by growers and shippers of other produce, from grapes to mangoes, available now in temperate zone countries even in the middle of winter. As nice as it would be for large international banana producers to abandon monoculture with its reliance on pesticides and fungicides, only to have to abandon that one variety when its production is no longer economically sustainable, they may have no other choice if they want to continue with business as usual. It’s in the nature of their economic model. Locally sustainable small scale agricultural production would of course apply to bananas consumed in the tropics, as it always has, but not in colder countries, where they do not grow.

For all the convenience in the past century and more of being able to pick up a bunch of bananas at the grocer’s in countries where the average person would be more likely to see sub-tropical citrus fruit orchards than tropical banana plantations, not everyone enjoys bananas, or at least not the texture of actual bananas. They may like banana flavor, but they don’t care for the texture, which can be mushy and sticky, activating their gag reflex. For those people, the absence of bananas from the grocer’s would not be a painful loss. Certainly they would still like to have overripe bananas to use in banana bread and other delicious recipes. But unlike the supposedly fresh bananas for eating out of hand, bananas for cooking don’t have to look perfect. In that case, imperfect is just fine.
― Izzy

The last scene of Billy Wilder’s 1959 comedy Some Like It Hot, with Joe E. Brown and Jack Lemmon.

 

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Paper or Plastic?

 

When grocery stores were switching from paper bags to plastic bags for packing up customer purchases in the 1980s and 1990s, the clerks would ask the customers “Paper or plastic?”. At some point in the 2000s the question faded away and plastic bags became the default option. Some grocery chains no longer carry paper bags at all. Very few stores offer paper bags only, no plastic. The paper bag fell out of favor due to cost savings on material as well as on labor, as it requires less time and skill to pack a plastic bag than a paper grocery sack. Environmental costs for both are high, but people are discovering that costs for plastic bags after disposal are getting higher all the time since the plastic persists far longer than paper before breaking down into harmless components, if it ever does.

 

The humble paper sack that we take for granted today as just another everyday item began in 1871 with a patent taken out by Margaret Knight on a machine for folding and gluing paper sacks with flat bottoms. Her design was an improvement on an 1852 invention of another American, Francis Wolle, of a machine for making paper sacks shaped like large envelopes. The flat bottom that Ms. Knight added made the paper sack far more useful, and thereafter store clerks developed the skill of properly filling the sacks – heavy, durable items like canned goods on the bottom; light, fragile items like eggs and bread on top; double up the bags for weight or for items that might sweat moisture and compromise the integrity of a single bag.

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The Andy Monument at 17th Street and Broadway in New York City. The nearly ten foot tall chrome sculpture was created in 2012 by Rob Pruitt and is outside Warhol’s Factory building of the 1970s and early 1980s. Andy Warhol is depicted with his familiar Polaroid camera and a shopping bag, which would have been filled with copies of Interview magazine. Warhol used to stand in the street, signing autographs and giving away copies of his magazine. This shot, taken on May Day, shows Andy sporting a red May Day/General Strike sticker. Photo by Thomas Altfather Good.

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Paper straws like these were in general use until the late twentieth century, when plastic straws took over. Paper straws all but disappeared until recently, when a growing realization that plastic straws presented the same disposal problems as plastic bags prompted a comeback. Photo by Marco Verch.

Bagging up groceries in plastic sacks requires no such skills because only a handful of items will fit in each, and unlike paper, the plastic presents no difficulties handling moisture. The plastic bags we have gotten accustomed to using once and throwing away were invented by Sten Gustaf Thulin in the early 1960s for a Swedish packaging company. They came into widespread use in this country in the 1980s, and then store clerks had to start asking the paper or plastic question of every customer. Switching from paper to plastic seemed like a good idea at the time. Trees would be saved, and the high environmental cost of processing wood pulp into paper could be avoided. The plastic bags? They were each so thin and flimsy that surely the environmental costs of producing them had to be lower than cranking out paper sacks.


A disturbing scene from the 1931 film Frankenstein, directed by James Whale, with Boris Karloff as The Monster and Marilyn Harris as Little Maria.

On the front end, yes, that turned out to be true. But those thin, flimsy plastic bags took awhile to accumulate in their billions and then trillions, in landfills and in the oceans, where, unlike paper bags, they stubbornly refuse to deteriorate for years, maybe generations. They just accumulate, posing a threat to wildlife on land and in the sea. In the United States, recycling plastic grocery bags has never topped 10 percent of the total used. They are thin, they are flimsy, and therefore as far as most people are concerned, to the extent that they think about it all, they are one time use items. Like Dr. Frankenstein with his creation, The Monster, we invest most of our intellectual energy and talents in the invention, and very little in contemplation of the long term consequences of our ingenuity, which, unintended though they may be, afflict us after our formulations have broken loose from us, as all creations eventually do, and roam the countryside causing havoc.
― Techly

 

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