A friend sent me this interview, from the Indianapolis Star, about our current situation. The interviewees were two area residents, each 102 years old. Clearly they've seen a lot. Here are a couple of their responses that I found particularly interesting.
Did your parents ever talk about what it was like to have a newborn [during the Spanish flu pandemic]?
I don't think they talked to me that way. They didn't talk much politics at home. They just put their head down ... and went ahead and worked and scraped and tried to keep food on the table.
What were your concerns [about polio] as a parent?
We all were worried but didn’t talk about it; it wasn’t blown up like this virus is.
Just like we would be now, when there's no vaccine. You were helpless. You just hoped for the best. ... I don't think we were organized enough to do anything (like this). The government didn't step in and do anything for you.
But my absolute favorite part of the interview came in the interviewer's reaction to one lady's suggestion for ways to save money based on her Depression-era experiences (emphasis mine).
To save money, the little things add up. Roush has always washed Ziploc bags, for instance.
To which my reaction, as well as that of the friend who sent me the article, was, "Is she suggesting that most people don't wash and reuse their Ziploc bags?"
Ziploc bags. Depends on what was in them and how difficult it would be to clean them. Anything with raw meat. No. I throw away. (At some point aren't you wasting more resources than you are saving?)
If they held something like snack food - pretzels, for example - I rinse them out and then put them in a place where I can use them for a non-food purpose - holding game pieces, for example.
Right. It all depends on what it's being used for. Sous vide generally gets new or close-to-new bags, to minimize the chance of leaking. If the food is unmarinated or there's no oil in the marinade, I will wash and reuse the bag, otherwise it's generally too hard to clean and gets tossed. I reuse raw-meat bags until they wear out, because I label them by type and keep them in the freezer—chicken always goes in chicken bags, bacon in bacon bags, etc. I also keep non-food and food bags separate. Food bags can become non-food bags, but not vice versa.
Mostly, however, I just hand wash and reuse a bag until it has been used for something I don't want to deal with washing, or it wears out. Then I throw it away with very little guilt. I'm much the same way with parchment paper, which can do cookies many times over, but freely gets tossed when it's messy.
You wouldn't believe how much easier the process is with the handy IKEA dryer that hangs near the sink.
