by Virgil Teague

Created on: May 24, 2008

LOADING IN AND LOADING OUT

You know how it is: after a couple of hours at the store, including the interminable check-out process, you get home with a trunk full of groceries: boxes and cans, cartons, bottles and jugs.

You schlep it all into the kitchen and load up the counter, preparing to sorting it all out for stashing in the pantry, the freezer, the 'fridge and the shelves.

In a few days, the contents have been consumed, so you start throwing away the boxes and cans and bottles and cartons and jugs. Then you schlep it all out to the curbside container for pickup and disposal.

Pound for pound, I'll bet I throw away fifty percent of what I've bought: the packaging and wrapping and containers and trays, the jugs and cups and bottles, the cans and cartons and boxes.

I suppose I ought to be grateful. From what I've read, most developing countries don't have decent packaging and lose as much as fifty percent of their foodstuffs before they can be consumed.

Humanoids once used leaves and animal skins and gourds to store and transport their food, and eventually progressed to woven baskets. The earthen jug was the Tupperware of its time and solved many food storage problems.

Glass was discovered as early as 5000 B.C. in the Far East, but it was primarily used for jewelry. (The image of a matching bracelet and necklace set made of dangling baby food jars comes to mind.) It shouldn't come as a surprise that the Egyptians took up glass-making a thousand years later and invented the glass jar. After all, the essentials were at hand: limestone, silica, soda and plenty of sand.

As early as the 1st Century B.C. the Chinese were using a papery substance made of treated mulberry bark to wrap food items. A "glass can" appeared in Europe about the time of the Industrial Revolution, and in the late 1800s an American named Robert Gair tinkered together a machine that made paper boxes.

A paper bag machine was invented in 1844 in Bristol, England, and I understand a working model of the device is on display in a museum, still cranking out paper bags with a characteristically British "pip-pip-pip. Pip-pip-pip."

About that same time, the future of the tin can was assured when the Duke of Saxon stole the plating process which mated a layer of tin to the interior of iron containers.

Tinned foods were first tested on the unsuspecting armies of the Crimean War. (And having divested themselves of quantities of heavy food items in favor of the tins, many of these soldiers were no doubt involved

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