Snack Attack

I think I have mentioned that cookies are one of Rick's staple foods. An important holiday food is the potato chip (and its similarly fried and packaged relatives.) Chips are not a daily habit, and Rick doesn't eat them alone -- he's a social eater. But it's baseball season, a time when boisterous, hungry men sometimes appear in our living room bearing plastic bags full of salty crunchables and creating a bit of a moral dilemma: be true to the experiment, or be true to old friends and the traditions that bring us together?

Luckily, just this year Frito-Lay has come out with a compostable chip bag made of plant fibers. I'm not in the business of promoting potato chips and their makers. I'm just saying --  if you feel the need to have chips with your ball game and you're trying to avoid plastic, you have options.

The new bag is unbelievably noisy. I don't think you could hear the game if you ate straight from the bag. And it doesn't solve certain problems (such as high sodium content and the Mariners' pathetic offensive play.)
Also there remains the question of how to compost this bag. The instructions on the back state that it requires a hot compost pile, which we don't have. (We compost, but we're lazy composters who don't turn or moisten our pile or pay any attention to the ratio of nitrogen to carbon. So our compost pile is slow and cool.)

This is a problem that's turning up in lots of places as biodegradable alternatives to plastic appear on the market. Here's an example: the college where I teach introduced service ware made of cornstarch in its cafeterias last year. It's terrific that we're not using plastic spoons and forks any more, but what becomes of the corn utensils? Currently they go in the garbage, where their biodegradability remains purely theoretical: no matter how organically grown, stuff doesn't break down in the landfill, because there's not enough oxygen under the weight of all that refuse.

I think solutions to these problems will come on line over time. This year, one of the campuses of my college has purchased a "Rocket composter" to break down its cafeteria food waste. The Rocket will probably be able to handle cornstarch service ware, and if all goes well, the other campuses will get their own Rockets. And the city of Portland has started a pilot project to collect home compost just like it does yard debris. Perhaps eventually we'll be able to put our compostable chip bags in a curbside bin.

Meanwhile, we're making a noisy little collection of those crinkly plant fiber bags, and the pennant race can proceed with its snacking traditions intact.