perfectly good trash

I use forks and spoons cause I can't throw my hands in the dishwasher and go to bed. It's likely though that nothing in my ol' Kentucky kitchen's utensil drawer is fit to land an appearance at the big William and Kate event coming up. As flatware goes, it's nice and all, but it ain't even distant kin to real silverware, and it's certainly not fit for royal occasions.

A couple of years ago I went through a little plastic ware phase - mostly because I was lazy. But I justified using and tossing a few dozen Dixie pieces cause it saved local H20and stopped the drought in East Africa. Actually, neither is hardly true. And as it turned out, it was a dumb idea.

In the meantime, I got myself some nice, fancy looking plastic spoons and forks and knives for when company came for dinner. They were pretty cool - if you didn't get too close - and if you didn't pick them up - and if your meat wasn't too tough. The pieces was coated with a really shiny silver. But this was quite obviously not real silverware. It was plastic. And every one of my friends who used it knew it was plastic. You can pay a little more for the silver version, but still all you've got is plastic.

While the reusable stuff sat ready and clean but unused, I was eating with the throw-away stuff, using it once, and, well, throwing it away. It never occurred to me that that didn't mean it was broken; that it could still feed me; that I could use it again. It may have been unconventional, but it wasn't like it was against the law or unbiblical to clean the spoon and use it again - just like new. The label told me it was disposable and useless once it got dirty. So I threw away lots of used spoons because that's what we do with used, plastic spoons.

After a while I started associating again with better spoons. In the end it was actually more economical. And I got tired, even weary of throwing away perfectly good trash.