Life: Packing A Punch

At the end of the day, Edward Scissorhands didn’t have it all that bad. I don’t know about you but I seem to spend half my time walking around the house, making vague scissor actions with my hand, looking for something to cut food free from their plastic shackles.

Yes, there are ‘easy tear’ perforations along the top of some packets and yes, these certainly *are* easy if you’re performing a magic trick that involves showering your audience with spiral pasta. But if you’re planning on serving those lolly snakes on something other than the floor, best find those scissors, my friend.

I mean, what is WITH food packaging these days? Everywhere I look, it’s a world of packaging pain. Not only do we have excessively packaged items like individually-wrapped Mentos making Mother Earth its bitch, but every time I try to open orange juice on a plane, I end up painting the town orange. And let’s not mention those times when I have taken the foil seal from the butter and wiped it directly on toast so as not to waste all that precious butter stuck to it. Nor shall we count the times I have had to ‘gently pierce’ the top of the soy sauce when the ‘easy pull ring’ has broken away in my nearly-severed finger. And yes, by ‘gently pierce’, I mean ‘stab in a violent and extremely dangerous manner with a kitchen knife’.

(Kitchen knives and scissors, by the way, require a ‘Hannibal Lecter’ level of security in which – as one friend recently discovered – the one thing you need to open the item you’ve just purchased is, in fact, the item you just purchased. Ah, the irony! Put *that* in a song, Alannis.)

Of course there is always the exception. I’ll freely admit that Weetbix kind of freaks me out with the way its plastic is folded like the nice folk at Sanitarium have simply tucked them in to go beddy-byes. It makes me wonder – not for the first time – what Weetbix are actually made of that they don’t need to be hermetically sealed. Indeed, when mixed with milk or water and left to stand for a few hours, they can be used to re-grout your bathroom. Fact.

But then there’s wine – and this is where I turn my frown upside down. The advent of the screw top lid has saved me from hours of looking for the corkscrew and/or playing ‘cork-bobbing’ with a bread knife. But of course wine *has* to be easier to open just to counteract the stress caused by all the other packaging, right?  RIGHT?

What is your packaging peeve?

The formerly fashionable NDM had three children and discovered that brown is the new black the hard way. The force behind the once-was-blog Not Drowning, Mothering, she now very occasionally writes for the sometimes-blog The NDM. In her spare time, she enjoys baking cakes, cyber-hassling advertising executives and collecting photos of unusual objects made out of paperclips.