Outside the Box: The Story of Food Packaging

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Well, of course, some of the earliest you might not even recognize as packages.

It would be the human hand, it would be the human stomach, it would be the mouth, it would be leaves that chimps or early humans would use to transport products.

It would be gourds, horns, eventually baskets much later.

These gourds and leaves and horns, they're the first food packaging.

And they started something that ended up changing the course of human civilization.

I know it might sound like we're overselling things a bit here, but really bear with us.

It'll all make sense.

You're listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And I'm Nicola Twilley.

And this episode, we are going to tell you the story of how our food got dressed and why we might want to help it get naked again.

In other words, it's the story of packaging.

It's interesting because I went to Bali last year and they had no plastic until 15 years ago, so everything, all of their food was wrapped in leaves.

That's Robert Proctor.

He's a professor of history of science at Stanford University and co-author of the book Packaged Pleasures, How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire.

And in the book, Robert and his co-author Gary Cross go back to the dawn of packaging.

Well, almost the dawn.

Like Robert says, the very first food packaging would have been ephemeral.

Those leaves haven't left much trace in the archaeological record.

The first food packaging that did leave a significant archaeological trace is clay pots.

They date back to at least 25 to 30,000 years ago.

But those pots were still pretty rare until the invention of the potter's wheel.

That took about 20,000 years more.

And then suddenly, clay pots were everywhere.

And in a way, the pot is the artificial stomach that is extended out into the world.

That is a pretty weird way to think about a pot, but I like it.

And with this new external food holder, humans could get a head start on breaking down food outside the stomach.

We've been able to roast food since we'd had fire, but this amazing new food container, the clay pot, this allowed us to do all sorts of other things.

Things like fermentation, so alcohols and wines, those are no doubt the result of the happy accident of storing grain, storing grapes, and then discovering that when they ferment, that's nice as well.

You couldn't have that without containers, and then you get sauces, you get stews, you get new forms of cooking which don't just involve a spit but actually some kind of combination.

People could use these new clay pots to make sauces and stews and pickles and booze.

Oops, that rhymed.

But they could create entirely new food flavors.

And as important, or even more important than the joy to our taste buds, they could make food that would last longer than the fresh stuff.

And you have a container to put it in.

And that means it can now be transported.

It's really hard to overstate how big of a change that must have been.

I mean, food was always local before the invention of pots because it had to be.

And not just local, but really local.

You ate what you found, you ate what you hunted, you ate what you grew.

And if you could trade it, put it into amphorae and ship it around the Mediterranean or around the southeast of Asia, that had a tremendous impact.

And of course, only certain things could be stored and easily traded, but you got sauces and wines, preserved things, oils, and it really delocalized food for the first time in history.

The thing is, most people didn't get to enjoy all these delicious sauces and wines and oils.

These pots were really valuable, and so they were meant for the elites.

But at the same time, food packaging helped create elites.

And it allows stratification, accumulation of wealth, the world's first obesity.

In a way, it really allows class society.

I mean, try to imagine any early wealth without some way to

contain food.

I mean when you think about it, food is harvested in very episodic ways.

I mean it's it ripens only a few weeks out of a year.

You have to find some way of containing it for a long period of time and preserving it.

And of course the pot becomes part of that long process of finding ways to get through the periods when there is no food available.

And it immensely enhances the power of those who control the food.

Gary Cross is the second voice you heard there after Robert.

They wrote Packaged Pleasures Together, and he's a professor of modern history at Penn State.

And Gary's point is that the pot turned food from a shared resource into private property.

We moved from a period where food might have been stored in a pit that would have been held in common, perhaps by

a reasonably large group of people, to food and drink that would be held privately and controlled by elites.

And thus the container becomes a sort of an emblem of privilege and power for hundreds of years.

Standing in my kitchen surrounded by Ziploc and Tupperware, this is sort of hard to get my head around.

But for most of human history, anything that could hold food was a symbol of real power.

And there's more.

Storing food made food resources more predictable throughout the years, so it allowed for population growth.

Now you have both class stratification and a growing population.

So without the storage and accumulation you get with containers, you wouldn't have much of modern civilization.

I mean, literally.

In their book, Robert and Gary come straight out and say that these early food containers, these clay pots, they're what made the great ancient civilizations of China, India, Sumeria, and Mesoamerica even possible.

And some of the greatest materials ever invented were invented to hold food, like the first paper.

Paper was invented in China almost 2,500 years ago.

It was made from sheets of mulberry bark.

And what did they use this first paper for?

To wrap food.

It wasn't until later that they used it for toilet paper and for sharing pornography.

All the important things.

But food came first.

And then there's glass.

That was invented in Mesopotamia about 3,500 BCE, and it was used for food containers, cups, bowls, and jars.

I mean, glass and paper, it's hard to imagine any aspect of our lives today without them, and they were invented as forms of food packaging.

But like we said, glass bottles and mulberry paper and ceramic pots, these were all for the elites.

The powerful got the best food, and then they could get even richer by shipping that packaged food off to distant lands.

It wasn't until really surprisingly recently that common people, such as myself and me, regularly got our grubby little hands on food packaging.

And we have Napoleon to thank for that.

Well, like a lot of these innovations has to do with warfare.

Napoleon was interested in provisioning his armies over long distances and actually offered a prize for anyone who could, you know, create foods that would not spoil.

It was a cash prize of 12,000 francs.

That was a year's salary at the time.

And a guy called Nicolas Aper rose to the challenge.

He spent years developing a method to seal food in cork-stoppered bottles and then boil it so it wouldn't go bad.

He won the prize and he did deliver a batch to the French Navy in 1803, though, to be honest, it didn't actually serve to feed Napoleon's army at the time.

That's right.

They lost the war and it took a Brit to make Apair's new technique useful by inventing the tin can.

These early tin cans, they'd be opened by a bayonet.

It actually took three-quarters of a century to figure out how to pry that top off.

Yes, it wasn't until 70 years after the invention of the can that anyone invented a can opener.

Gary says that's why it's hard to think of the tin can as a packaging revolution, because it didn't happen overnight.

In some ways it's it's incremental and not very dramatic.

In the middle of the 19th century there would be small improvements, various other kinds of cutting machines to take the iron and tin covered sheet metal and wrap it around a cylinder and add a seam of

solder.

These kinds of machines came along in the 1850s and 1860s that made it possible to have tin cans by the Civil War.

During the Civil War, a guy called Gail Borden sold sweetened condensed milk in a can, and Borden is still a brand we see in stores today.

And along with their condensed milk, Union soldiers ate canned pork and beans, but it often spoiled, and there was lead in the food from the soldering, and then the boiling process meant that it all tasted like shoe leather.

And so there was more incremental progress.

But they're not terribly dramatic, and it's really only at the end of the 19th century, really about 1904 and 05, when you have the full completion of the, I suppose, canning revolution with the so-called double-seamed can that reduced the need for solder and the dangers of it, which was an ingenious invention, but one that isn't very dramatic.

But its impact was dramatic in the sense that there was this huge increase in the speed of producing cans and their cheapness.

So you could, instead of canning just for the military or just for the elite, you could can tomato soup for the masses.

And Andy Warhol's future subject matter was born.

Robert and Gary's book is called Packaged Pleasures, and they refer to this time, this moment at the end of the 19th century, where tin cans and cheap bottles brought deliciousness to the masses.

They call it the packaged pleasure revolution.

It's not just that we all had access to treats that were delicious, it's really that these treats they used to be rare, but now they could be bottled up and enjoyed whenever you wanted.

There are lots of reasons why these kinds of pleasures become more widespread, but packaging is a big part of it.

And this democratization of packaging, I know we keep saying it, but it's really kind of shocking how recent of a thing this is in human history.

The elaborate ceramics and much of what we find, you know, and in museums, a lot of this for the elites.

And that is one of the important things that changes in the 19th century with the packaged pleasures revolution is that containers become ubiquitous.

The pop bottle, the mason jar, the tin can,

all of those things are much more recent.

Ah, mason jars.

Where would Brooklyn be without them?

But the funny thing is, the mason jar represented a tremendous breakthrough in a really difficult problem, the lid problem.

We might have had glass bottles for 2,000 years, but sealing them up, that was a different matter.

At first, people used wood and and oil-soaked rags, and then in the 17th century, French winemakers started using plugs made from the bark of cork trees.

We know them as corks.

And then John Landis Mason, in 1858, he invented the screw-lid jar.

Until then, all these tops that Nikki just described, these were better for narrow-mouthed jars.

But the screw lid that we still use today, that works for wider-mouthed glass jars.

But wide-mouth, narrow-mouth, schmouth.

Mason's real innovation was resealability.

You know, it made it possible for you to to open, say, a jar of, I don't know, pickles or mayonnaise or whatever, and then screw the cap back on and preserve it for some period of time.

And, you know, it also eventually would facilitate not just the preservation of a whole lot of foodstuffs, condiments, and lots of other things.

Peanut butter, right, is what I think of.

And for many Americans, being able to preserve peanut butter, that is key to survival.

The PB ⁇ J is practically America's national sandwich, although I guess the burger has a strong claim.

But to go with your PB ⁇ J, how about a nice bottle of Coke?

Turns out that keeping that fizz in the bottle, that's another recent triumph of packaging.

It's hard to imagine now, but drinking soda used to be a communal thing.

It was social.

It was an outing.

You'd meet your friends and sit around the counter sipping a special treat.

Soda couldn't be bottled, so you couldn't drink it at home.

until the bottle cap.

That's one of the most interesting stories.

Right.

And there were lots of different attempts to make bottle caps.

You know, some of them involved little brackets, some of them involved stoppers that would be inside the bottle and would have to be pulled out.

And then, of course, the the cap that we're all familiar with today is developed by a guy named Painter.

It's called the Crown Cap, which made it possible to very rapidly top a bottle, particularly useful in preserving carbonated beverages, which is where it was used extensively when it appeared in the early 1890s.

You know what's funny?

Before the crown cap, one of the earlier attempts at keeping in the fizz was something called the Hutchinson stopper.

It involved a rubber disc mounted on a spring, and when you pushed the disc in, it made a popping noise, which is where we get the name Soda Pop.

The very first Coca-Cola bottles were Hutchinson stopper type bottles.

These tops, first the Hutchinson stopper and then the crown cap, what they did is make it so that now we could all have a special treat right in our own kitchen.

A social pleasure became a private personal one.

But this did something else too.

Suddenly there was one Coca-Cola instead of many different colas.

Like in the case of sodas, for example, you go from hundreds of different kinds of soda.

Some of it, I mean, I've seen recipes that kind of surprise me, the

exotic flowers that would be used and vegetables as well.

And so every farmer might have their own root cellar, root, you know, wild plants, and they would make their own root beers.

So George Washington had his own recipe.

A lot of the founding fathers had their own root beer recipes.

And a lot of those roots are weeded out, so to speak, and become much more narrow in terms of what's actually added when it becomes mass produced.

Packaging meant that we could all taste the same thing wherever we were.

For the first time, there could be national food and drink brands.

So instead of hundreds of regional soda flavors, you get just a couple.

And instead of eggs and bacon, you get corn flakes.

Like with the can, the story of paper and cardboard packaging is one of incremental improvements.

So it might not seem like the major revolution that it was, but there were some pretty big, pretty recent changes.

Like it wasn't until 1867 that paper was made from wood instead of cloth, and that made it a lot cheaper.

And if you think of something like the corrugated box, it's so ubiquitous, you don't think about it, but it actually is a pretty amazing invention.

You know, you've got paper buoyed on two sides and

in the middle a kind of a wavy form of it.

Corrugated cardboard just did not exist until the 1850s.

Before that, people had to use wooden crates to ship food, which weighed a ton and were also more expensive.

And it's a strong box, and it made it possible to replace wooden boxes and barrels, and made it possible to ship stuff without near as much weight as was the case in the past.

Little things like this really revolutionize transport of goods.

Revolutionize transport and revolutionize breakfast.

Right, the corn flakes.

So we sort of told the story of cornflakes in our breakfast episode last year, but here's the thing.

Without a lightweight, moisture-proof, strong-sided box, you can't have cornflakes.

They would get crushed on the way to your breakfast bowl.

The invention of cornflakes drove the introduction of these kind of wax-lined paperboard cartons.

And in turn, the wax-lined paperboard cartons made the cornflakes possible.

And before you know it, you have cracker jacks and Nabisco Unita biscuits.

That's the very first cracker sold in a package, rather than in bulk from a cracker barrel.

And they're joined by all kinds of other snacks, all kept fresh and whole inside this new form of packaging.

And these big square paperboard boxes made something else possible, too.

Well, of course, what the packaging does is it allows you to label it.

And once you label something, it makes it possible to develop trademarks.

It allows you to have a label that serves as a form of advertisement, serve as a means to create demand for a product, that creates illusion perhaps in some cases about what is contained in the box or in the bottle and becomes almost as important as the contents itself.

So once you start to look at it, big picture, this food packaging revolution, the packaged pleasure revolution as Gary and Robert call it, it it didn't just preserve food or make it portable.

I know it's a complete cliche to say it, but it really changed everything.

It's a transformation that allows people to dole out things in a sort of a convenient bite-sized form that really didn't exist before.

And it ended the communal meal.

Even as early as 1910, candy bars were sold as alternatives to having a common meal.

You would buy a quarter pound of candy bar and that would be your lunch.

And the whole kind of shift away from the family or neighborly sharing of food, you know, companion, you know, sharing of bread is one of the partial casualties of the package revolution.

The whole idea of the snack food and the way that it becomes possible to basically graze all day because your food source doesn't depend upon sharing of a common table and it's something you can get out of a bag and you can eat while you're driving or walking or doing whatever you want while you're listening to your iPad or whatever.

Well, there's huge social transformations that come out as a result of this.

So it allows

people to have vegetables or foods in the winter.

It allows people to have them from distant places.

and a variety that was never possible before and a satiety that was never possible before.

In a way, our book is about the prehistory of addictions because things that were rare, once rare, you know, the sweets and fruits, could now be had year-round and in a near-infinite quantity and much cheaper too.

All of this involved a massive dropping of prices.

And not only that, but the packaging concentrates the experience, concentrates this sensation, intensifies it.

So obviously there are both good and bad things about this democratization of food and pleasure.

Packaging means we can eat a wider variety of food all year round, but we don't eat as communally as we did in the past.

And then in some ways, Robert says packaging helped launch the modern obesity epidemic.

Now we can have sweets whenever and however we want them.

In some ways, we're still playing by the rules in which pleasure was scarce.

We really haven't really come to terms with the immense complexity of having pleasure that is so ubiquitous and so readily accessible.

And where to draw the line is something that has bedeviled us throughout this century.

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Talking to Gary and Robert, there are two things that really stand out.

I've said this already, but I'm gonna say it again.

Mass market ubiquitous food packaging is really pretty recent and it's made huge changes in how we consume food.

But there's something else that came with those changes.

A lot of waste.

In America, the Environmental Protection Agency has found that a third of municipal solid waste, the stuff that goes into landfills, is packaging.

And two-thirds of that is food packaging.

That means that each American, on average, throws about two-thirds of a pound of food packaging in the garbage every single day.

Just try to imagine how many paper boxes and plastic jars and chip packets and milk cartons and coffee cups, how much of that stuff it would take to get up to two-thirds of a pound?

That's actually a lot.

And like Gary and Robert told us, the packaging revolution started with paper and glass and tins, but a lot of our food nowadays comes in plastic.

And that is a whole other environmental nightmare.

There are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris floating about in the ocean today.

And yes, I did say trillion.

So you might say, but I recycle all my food packaging.

First of all, that's actually pretty much impossible because most places don't recycle polystyrene.

But even when you can and do recycle your food packaging, it's not a perfect solution.

In general, it does take a lot less energy energy to recycle glass and aluminum and plastic than making something from raw materials, but it still takes energy.

And then, more often than you hope, recycling plants can't actually recycle all the stuff you send their way.

It might have got contaminated, for instance, and so some ends up in the landfill anyway.

And then, even after a jar or box is recycled, some products like some plastics and paper, they can only be recycled a limited number of times.

They can't be remade forever.

So, I'm still doing recycling, but I'm really trying to avoid it as much as I can also.

So I consider it as alpha waste.

That's Melissa de la Fontaine.

She's based in Montreal and she's trying to live a zero waste life.

Gastropod listener Becca Frazier suggested we should give her a call to find out how Melissa gets by without food packaging.

We'll talk to Melissa more a little later, but okay, packaging was invented to hold food, but now we make huge pits, landfills, to hold that packaging.

Recycling is good, but it's not perfect.

So what other solutions are there?

Biodegradable packaging?

That seems cool, right?

I mean, it seems like it could solve our whole food packaging waste conundrum.

Well, yes and no.

Things don't biodegrade very quickly in landfills.

There's not enough oxygen for that to happen.

You can find newspapers from decades ago in landfills that you can still read.

Even if it's a compostable package, most of those only decompose in the heat of a municipal compost pile, not a home bin.

So unless you have a citywide composting program, most biodegradable food packages aren't really going anywhere.

People are working on better biodegradable solutions, but they're basically not on grocery shelves yet.

Of course, there is one fully biodegradable kind of packaging that really does get broken down at home, and that's edible packaging, which, as it turns out, goes way back.

Yeah, that way you would have been much more likely to have edible packaging 300 years ago than 50 years ago.

One form of it, of course, is pastry, which comes down just to pasties, and where you basically take a pastry in which you put things like potatoes and beef and onions and you make it into a meal.

That would be one real common way of containing food in an edible form.

Yeah, so you would bring, instead of a lunchbox or a sandwich, you'd bring your pie

to your work or to the fields.

And that would be your container.

It must have been a tough crust, but yeah, it's a kind of a pie packaging.

So Cornish passies are the trad version of edible packaging.

But then we met David Edwards and he is trying to reinvent edible packaging.

It feels

like it's cold but it's dry.

That's the surprising thing.

Even on a hot day it's it's the surprising thing.

Can I try one of these halves over here?

Yeah yeah.

You can sort of mush with it a little.

Yeah.

It has that sort of jelly like

take a little bite actually is a better way to do it.

Yeah, it's like kind of

the best way to

Let's try this one then.

Wiki pearls are David's first edible packaging product.

So David is a scientist and an inventor and the founder of Cafe Art Science and Le Laboratoire in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I at some point in the early middle 2000s was working in Africa and there were lots of trash that was sort of piling up.

And so I began to think about why we didn't really use the example of the fruit to package food more wisely, I guess.

The coconut is by far the best bottle we have and it has two layers.

One is an edible layer which is the endoderm, the white thing that you stuff that we eat and then you have the hard shell, the endocarp.

Fruit that is not liquid tends to have just a skin like a grape.

Those wiki pearls we tasted are indeed like a grape, mushy inside and with a skin.

I'm cutting here through the cherry wiki pearl so you can see the coconut based ice cream and the skin and you can see that the ice cream is already melting, but the skin hangs together.

So you can actually put this in a microwave.

Now, you could blow it up if you make a high intensity, but it can melt and it becomes like a milkshake, basically.

So the thing that Cynthia and I are putting in our mouths is like a cherry-tomato size.

And the outside is like fruit leather in cherry and chocolate and blueberry flavors.

And I kept eating them all in one mouthful, which is wrong.

But if you bite into them, you see that the inside is this coconut ice cream.

And so the next question is, how on earth does fruit leather work as packaging for ice cream?

I mean, that seems insane.

Like, sure, for a few hours, but fruit leather can't hold a liquid for long, can it?

But if you make these skins around yogurt, it's stable for a month.

or maybe 50 days.

So it's a real barrier.

So it really is packaging, and it really is edible.

And the trick there then is the combination of the particles, the food particles, which is new, but also this layering, like we we do with our skin.

Sorry,

you're saying our skin is the ultimate edible packaging?

I knew I was going to be in trouble for saying that.

I'm just

pointing out that the structure of the skin, the stratum cordium,

is really how nature makes like the skin of a grape, which is maybe a better analogy.

Or the skin of a chicken?

Yeah, why not?

The skin of a chicken.

That's even more appropriate.

You're going to edit that out.

Sorry, David.

His point, though, is that he can embed food powder in layers and turn it into skin, which, just like human or chicken, or grape skin, holds liquids in and keeps other liquids out.

Here's the science of how it works.

So, food particles have a charge and like an electrical charge.

And so, they can be put together like a brick wall.

And so, what we do is we take food particles and we have between them polysaccharides.

Polysaccharides are just a bunch of sugar molecules bonded together.

And they're either of of a mushroom origin or an

algae origin and calcium.

And so those three things form a gel.

And then we create two or three layers of those.

And so that's really what gives the skin,

it's both edible, but it's also a real barrier.

I have to say, these wiki pearls are so much more fun when you imagine the fruity outer layer is human skin.

But I had another important question.

Why are they called wiki pearls?

Yeah, that's funny.

Well, of course, now the marketing folks don't call it wiki pearls anymore, but we call it wiki pearls.

I call it wiki pearls.

Why?

So I was really interested in creating a food form that was edited by the public and that would evolve in public hands.

And so, and there was a couple ways that would happen.

And in principle, you can package or surround any food form by pretty much any kind of food skin.

And so it's a really interesting designer opportunity for all of us.

So we made early on a kind of a vending machine that allowed you to say, I want, you know, vanilla ice cream and a lemon skin, or I want a, you know, a Fanta and a chocolate skin or whatever.

And it then gets made and then that sort of pops out.

Unfortunately, you can't design your own wiki pearls.

David's vending machine doesn't exist right now, but you can buy these wiki pearls in hundreds of stores all around New England.

So does this do away with packaging?

Well, not yet.

Nope.

If you go to the store looking for wiki pearls, you'll find them sold in a box.

And so if you ask why is the wiki pearl selling in a box right now in retail, like stop and shop,

well, it's a combination of things.

One, there's this need or this interest to put marketing information on the outside of the container.

And secondly, there's this issue of hygiene.

And so for the same reason that we're wrapping potatoes and packaging grapes in plastic, there's a resistance to selling wiki pearls as you would sell grape, or as we used to sell grapes, actually, where you sort of ask people then to wash their grapes.

And so you can wash these, you can drop them in water and rinse them and clean them.

So the surface does function in that fruit kind of way.

But it does lead to this issue.

Well, then how does this actually contribute to, you know, getting rid of plastic and food packaging?

There are ways in theory that these wiki pearls could be sold in bulk.

And so in the same way that we sell wiki pearls here in the restaurant where you have a bin like you would have with apples,

you can sell wiki pearls and consumers then take the wiki pearls and drop them into a bag.

Or here, because it's a frozen product, we have a special thermos like you would get at certain cafes and things like that for coffee.

And people walk away with the fruit or with the wiki pearls.

And that is how wiki pearls are sold at Cafe Art Science.

But in the store, they're in the box.

Once again, they're being packaged in a redundant way, really.

Honestly, as a founder and a creator of the technology, it is extremely exciting to me to see the product consumed.

So right now we're so much at the beginning and I, of all people, have suffered a lot by my insistence on really extreme behavior change now.

David's an inventor, and some of his products have been really successful, but some haven't quite cut on.

Perhaps they were ahead of their time.

But he has big dreams for his edible packaging empire, and it doesn't stop with ice cream, which, you know, is important, but not necessarily essential, and also not really the biggest contributor to food packaging waste.

The ultimate goal is to create the water bottle.

Unlike ice cream containers, disposable plastic drink bottles are a huge waste problem.

As in the case of our wiki water,

we create a shell around the skin.

It's actually edible.

It's made of Zen protein, and so it tastes like a corn chip, basically.

And so in the same way the coconut creates a shell, we can create a shell.

This corn chip wiki water bottle is not in production yet, but David's hoping it will make its debut at a marathon in South Africa.

It seems like a great way that edible bottles would first make it to market would be in athletic contexts.

Because you can produce it, you really control the, I mean, if you think of it as a real change in consumer behavior, much more direct, you know, eating the bottle.

And so, but it makes so much sense.

It's such a waste problem in major athletic contexts.

So that's my hope.

David has a vision of an all-edible food packaging world, but it's not going to be easy to get there.

We have sort of a triple challenge here.

One is a scientific challenge.

That part he has a handle on.

We know how to make

non-plastic packaging now and so that's at this point relatively straightforward.

We're scaling up to sell nationwide.

But that still leaves two more challenges and they're even trickier.

The second is consumer behavior.

We are used to throwing the plastic water bottle in the back seat and leaving it for the weekend and it's hot and then putting it in the front and just sort of a consumer behavior that is contingent on plastic packaging.

And so changing consumer behavior is really difficult.

And so it's a collaborative thing.

So in a way, the future of food is really going to be decided by all of us.

The third thing is that we have a trillion-dollar food system.

And it fortunately works, and we can't have it not work.

And yet, that's a very massive and inertial system.

And changing it is difficult.

And while there's a will in the industry to change, there are many, many, many reasons why it is resistant to change.

And

not in a malicious way, but just by virtue of its size.

And so my point is that we are needing to create, likely, environments of retail and sort of modes of distribution that allow us to bring to consumer hands a product that is truly without packaging.

And we're just not there yet.

So here's where we are.

Food packaging was genuinely one of humanity's most important creations.

Putting food in pots and cans and bottles and boxes, it meant we could create large civilizations and wealth.

We could move food around the world and we could eat a wide variety of flavors all year round.

Some of us, anyway.

But once food packaging went mainstream, and especially once plastics got involved, it's created as many problems as it solved.

So is David's vision of a world filled with fully edible food packaging is that the solution?

Or is it much more simple?

Does our food just need to strip off again?

Melissa de la Fontaine, I live in Montreal since nine years and I'm zero waste since three years.

So, like, I'm trying to live a packaging-free life since then.

It's Melissa again.

We said we'd come back to her.

Melissa is not waiting for David's edible packaging to reach Montreal.

She's trying to avoid packaging entirely.

She brings bags and jars with her when she goes grocery shopping and the occasional pillowcase.

Yeah, I do.

They're really useful.

Yeah, I bring a pillowpastase, and it's a gift I received, and there are cupcakes in it.

So I I think I find it's really like perfect to go and get my bread.

It's taken her some time, but Melissa has managed to figure out how to buy almost everything she wants to eat unpackaged.

I found like like all the candies.

Like I kn when I started to visit your waste like I thought I couldn't buy like the the

cinnamon hearts at Saint Valentin or like the the mini eggs but I found them in bulk.

So I can find like many many many weird things in bulk.

There are some exceptions of course Melissa tries but so far it's impossible to live entirely without food packaging.

For example I still buy soy milk in in packaging also tofu but like I'm I'm really hoping the new store that is going to open that is your ways they told me they would have tofu in bulk so I'm really excited.

I love that the prospect of bulk tofu could make someone that excited.

Still, the impressive thing is that Melissa's really made a dent in her food packaging use.

And she's not alone.

This unpackaged thing is sort of a mini movement.

You might remember a few weeks ago we asked you guys to tape yourselves if you were going to visit one of these packaging-free grocery stores that are popping up.

Hi, my name is Mary and I am parked outside of Ingredients or as my GPS said, In.gredients.

It's a neighborhood grocer in Austin, Texas, and I'm about to go check it out.

Mary Batalora listens to Gastropod and lives in Texas and she went to explore her local package-free grocery store for us.

So I walked in and it just looks like kind of a normal grocery store and there's an aisle of

just kind of like what you would see at

like a Whole Foods with nuts

and pasta and little like plastic dispensaries and then oh this is interesting.

There's these dispensers of raw and organic coconut oil, Napa Valley organic apple cider vinegar.

That's interesting.

Organic sesame oil and organic tamari.

That's cool.

And it looks like there's like little glass bottles that you can even put it in.

I'm going to get some organic apple cider vinegar.

Okay.

So that was the closest thing to non-package that I feel like I've seen so far that I haven't seen anywhere else.

It looks like there's a bunch of frozen meats.

They're definitely packaged in like vacuum-packed packages.

Mary noticed that not quite everything came package-free.

So she found one of of the guys who worked there and asked why, and he directed her over to someone else.

I'm not sure if he talked to you a lot about kind of our pivot away from all zero packaging, but really what motivated that was that we were finding that we were wasting a lot of food because you know you get a 50 pound bag,

you sell five pounds of it and then in a few months it's gone stale and you can't sell any of it anymore.

And so then I mean that's like way more food waste than that we'd be created.

Like the ones that were the worst for us were like the gluten-free flowers, which like if you want coconut flour, you're so happy to find it, but so few people want coconut flour that we just ended up throwing away a lot of coconut flour.

I'm trying really hard not to laugh here.

But this is where the ideal of zero waste packaging runs into the practicality of food, which goes bad, and business, where you have to make money.

My partner Tim was in the Netherlands for work and he schlepped out to a store in Utrecht that had been billed as zero packaging.

He told me it looked like an indie mini Whole Foods and the guy who owns it told Tim that he doesn't even call the store zero packaging.

He said he can't sell jam in bulk.

And it's a tough business.

In fact, one other branch of the store that Tim had tried to visit was already closed.

Yeah, I sent my husband Jeff out to record for us too, but the unpackaged store in London, that had had to merge with the normal organic supermarket.

It just couldn't survive as a standalone.

The business model of packaging-free stores is one thing, but the bigger issue is that food packaging is intrinsic to the way we live our lives today.

It's hard to even imagine a modern food system without it.

But that doesn't mean we can't cut down, at least a little.

Not all our food needs to come in individual little packets that we just toss in the bin straight away.

David's edible packaging might help.

And then there's just using less.

Melissa knows her way of life might seem a little extreme.

Not everyone is going to go zero waste, but she doesn't think we all have to in order to make a difference.

We're the one buying stuff and when we buy something, we vote for it.

So if people buy packaged stuff, they vote for more packaged stuff.

Thanks this week to Gary Cross and Robert Proctor.

They're the authors of the book Packaged Pleasures: How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire.

And thanks also to my lovely husband Jeff for giving me that book in the first place.

Thanks also to David Edwards, founder of the Labratoire and Cafe Art Science, and inventor of WikiPearls, which you can find in stores in New England.

They're sold as non-dairy frozen treats under the brand name Incredible Innovations.

And an especially huge thanks to you guys for helping us explore the packaging-free movement.

Thanks to Becca Frazier for leading us to Melissa de la Fontaine.

And thanks to Mary Battalora for visiting Ingredients in Austin, Texas.

We have links to everyone's website and details on how you can get a hold of anything you're hearing about on our website at gastropod.com.

While you're there, check out our support page.

It's filled with lots of ways to help the show, donations, and more.

And share your adventures in packaging and trying to use less of it.

We'd love to hear your experiences and tips.

We're on Twitter at Gastropodcast and on Facebook as Gastropod, and you can always email us at contact at gastropod.com.

Come back in two weeks for some fried chicken.

Is that a bird?

Do you have a bird?

Yeah, I do have a bird.

That's great.

That's awesome.

Yep.

You have no trouble buying bird seed in bulk, I guess.

No, no, it's really a zero-waste bird also.

I bet the bird does make a little bit of waste himself.

Yeah, but it's like the same waste as I do, so it's fine.

It's going at the same place, right?

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