How I Finally Gave Up Plastic Wrap
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Welcome to Plastic-Free Kitchen Week on the Strategist, where we’ve been obsessively researching and testing plastic alternatives — for everything from appliances to cleaning supplies to cookware. For more, head to ourPlastic-Free Kitchen Week hub.
I grew up in a largely plastic-free household, less for environmental reasons than for aesthetic ones (or at least that’s how it seemed in the early ’90s). My mother, the Berkeley-based cook, activist, and advisory board member of thePlastic Pollution CoalitionAlice Waters, shunned plastic decades before the news began barraging us daily with terrifying facts about its toxicity and hyperprevalence in everything from our food to our vital organs.
I think my mom knew on some level that the older ways were the better ways. She preferred a mortar and pestle to a Cuisinart, a bath to a shower, and, well, parchment paper to plastic wrap. This meant that anything that might have benefited from a plastic sheath to keep it fresh — a sandwich, for instance — would have been folded neatly-ishinto a sheet of parchment paper like a deranged gift. Inevitably, the sandwich in question would be slightly more desiccated than if my mother had just used plastic wrap, but I did, in fact, survive to tell the tale.
Parchment paper and waxed paper bags alike followed me through all of my lunchbox days and, eventually, into my own kitchen. Still, Ididuse plastic wrap. It was 2010 and we weren’t yet aware of the metastatic evils of the petrochemical industry, and plastic wrap isexceptionally convenient.
It was only about three years ago — around the time that my daughter was born — that I flipped out and jettisoned all the plastic containers and bottles and bags and wraps in my house. Suddenly, I had nothing but parchment paper to fulfill most culinary tasks. And you know what? It came through.
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The key — for me, anyway — was discovering the pre-cut sheets, since nothing is worse than trying to sever a length of slick, silicone-coated paper using a sad little row of cardboard teeth that couldn’t cut through room-temperature butter. The sheets have become my kitchen hero; no exaggeration, I use them at least three times a day. Always for lining sheet pans to eliminate the need for clean-up when roasting vegetables or meat, but also to cover a bowl before it goes in the fridge (I place a folded sheet over the bowl and then put a smallish plate on top to weight it down), to wrap a handful of cherries to put in my daughter’s lunchbox, to fold like a turnover around a filet of fish before I bake it, to line cake tins, to drive my kid to school, to take out the trash … The sky’s the limit!
The sheets can do most things. And they’ve reminded me that convenience is not the raison d’être of humankind. In fact, I’ve found there to be a surprising amount of pleasure in thattinyextra moment of problem-solving.
More From This Series
- I Found the Best Plastic-Free Coffee Brewers, Including a Drip Machine
- Still Looking to Ditch that Plastic Spatula? We Have Plenty of Alternatives.
- All the Best Non-Plastic Tableware and Utensils for Kids
- How Our Readers are De-Plasticizing Their Kitchens
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