Words For <i>Your</i> Enjoyment: Plastic Utensils

Them: “Would you like bread and utensils with that?”

Me: “Why would I want utensils with that?”

Them: “Uh… So you can EAT when you get it home?”

Me: “Don’t you think I have forks and knives and stuff at home in my kitchen?”

Them: “Uh… If you did, would you be here…paying someone else to make you food?”

Good point. Really good point.

But still — this whole plastic utensil thing is getting a little out of control, don’t you think? Everywhere we go these days, everytime we order food, restaurants with take out counters or To Go areas are throwing plastic utensils wrapped in plastic (with a napkin thrown in) into our bags of food. Sometimes they ask, other times they don’t.

I’d like to know, what restaurants think about us (the public) and why they think we’d rather eat a salad or chicken parm with a black or white plastic fork and knife instead of the real deal?

I mean, really. When I think of using a plastic knife with bumpy-ridges of cutting goodness, I often don’t smile with satisfaction. I think instead about how I couldn’t even slit my own wrists with a knife like that (which is a bad thing). When I think about the spork or the rubbery fork that accompanies my salad — the kind that still has the plastic bubble remnants on some areas of the back of the fork from afterwhich it was pulled from a huge slate of thousands of plastic forks in a factory somewhere in China — it makes me wince.

Are we all really that lazy?

Do we really get home with our take-out food, walk past or through the kitchen (where we most always unwrap the food we just came home with), look at the drawer standing in front of us that holds the “gold at the end of the rainbow” (or silverware) and think to ourselves, “Silverware or plastic? Silverware or plastic? Yeah. Plastic.”

Is there any real, sensible, reason to use plastic utensils if we already have silverware in our homes or apartments or brown alleyway cardboard box (gotta hit all audience members, of course)? Is there any real reason for corporate restaurants and mom & pop cafes to offer us such plastic non-goodness? Is there a reason… A true, honest to god reason for them doing such a thing?

I’m not quite sure. But there’s a conspiracy theory in there somewhere.

Think and discuss.

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In other news, last night’s season finale of The O.C. was important for one very musical reason — the world premiere of the song “Hide and Seek” by Frou Frou’s Imogen Heap. If you watched the show and were wondering what that damn song was being played over the funeral sequence and the final moment when Trey was shot…this was the one.

In a word, amazing. Haunting. The kind that gives you chills. It’s available on iTunes, and Imogen‘s album will be available in July. Would love to know if you (a) listen to it, and (b) love it as much as I do.