What once was old is now new

While view­ing an old west­ern on tele­vi­sion, I watched the owner of the gen­eral store fill an order for a pio­neer woman. The basic sup­plies of flour, lard, salt and shot­gun shells were loaded into her gunny sack and taken to the buck­board for the long ride home.

The sack, or poke as they call it in the South, was usu­ally made from jute or hemp. It had orig­i­nally held grains or pota­toes and when emp­tied it was used for every­thing from hand tow­els, pothold­ers or dresses. But pri­mary use for a used poke was to refill it with other things for easy carrying.

In 1883, the U.S. Patent Office issued a patent for a paper bag machine which made paper bags com­mon place. With the birth of the Amer­i­can super­mar­ket in the early 1930s, the demand for paper bags sky­rock­eted. They replaced the gunny sack because of their avail­abil­ity, ver­sa­til­ity, strength and low cost.

For 50 years, the paper bag was the way to carry gro­ceries home to the pantry. In 1977, stores began to replace its paper shop­ping bags with plas­tic bags. By the mid 1980s, plas­tic bags became com­mon in gro­cery stores.

Gro­cery store pack­ers asked the age-old ques­tion, “Paper or plas­tic?” Plas­tic bags began lit­ter­ing our world as they blew in the wind account­ing for the fifth most col­lected item dur­ing coastal clean-ups. The demand for the oil and gas needed to make the poly­eth­yl­ene bags has also become an issue.

Today more than 100 bil­lion plas­tic bags are used annu­ally in the U.S.; nearly 1 tril­lion are taken home by con­sumers world wide each year. In the past 10 years, envi­ron­men­tal­ists sparked a move­ment to elim­i­nate the plas­tic gro­cery bag.

Cur­rently the trend is to B.Y.O.B., bring your own bag. Reusable gro­cery bags dur­ing the course of its life­time can replace more than 1,000 plas­tic and/or paper bags.

Unfor­tu­nately, fewer than one in six Amer­i­cans fre­quently wash their reusable gro­cery totes. Researchers have dis­cov­ered that lin­ger­ing bac­te­ria in the bag can eas­ily con­t­a­m­i­nate food.

Cross con­t­a­m­i­na­tion occurs when juices from raw meats or germs from unclean items are embed­ded into the fibers of the bag and then come in con­tact with ready-to-eat food. Each year nearly 50 mil­lion Amer­i­cans are affected with a food-borne illness.

As a pro­tec­tive mea­sure, keep those gro­cery tote bags clean by fre­quently wash­ing by hand or by pop­ping them in the machine. Keep all the areas where they may sit clean and free of pos­si­ble bacteria.

Store them in a clean dry loca­tion. I keep mine in the back­seat of my car for the next use. The trunk is a dark loca­tion which can enhance bac­te­ria growth easily.

It seems that we have gone full cir­cle with the gro­cery bag. From gunny to paper to plas­tic back to reusable tote.

I over­heard two ladies dis­cuss their bag col­lec­tion. It seems that the more afflu­ent the com­pany that donated the bag, the classier the shop­per; I recently stood in line to obtain a black one with Cadil­lac printed on the side. I won­der if any 5th Avenue cloth­ing designer has styled a dress out of reusable cloth gro­cery bags; now that would be a full cir­cle evo­lu­tion of the poke.

Bob­bie Ran­dall is a cer­ti­fied dia­betes edu­ca­tor, reg­is­tered, licensed dietit­ian. She super­vises a dia­betes self-management train­ing pro­gram at Aultman-Orrville Hos­pi­tal, Orrville. Con­tact her at bobbie.randall@aultmanorrville.org or 330–684-4776.

Posted by Bobbie Randall on May 2 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.