Before plastic?

[Chocolala]

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the environment and throwaway society, and this has led me to wonder what we did about various products before we had plastic. I assume we must have had alternatives, but what were they?

How were teeth brushed/cleaned? Did we eat yoghurt and if yes, how did we contain it? How did we get meat home from the shop/farm/wherever? What about strawberries?

Those are the ones that spring to mind, though there will be more. Anyone know the answers?

Brown paper packages tied up with string, as the lady sings. For meat anyway. I think yoghurt probably came in glass jars although would have been seen more as a health food. Paper bags for fruit and veg.

I am only -only! - 43 but I remember Tesco when I was a child had a pile of cardboard boxes at the back behind the tills which you would use to pack your shopping in, no carrier bags. It was just the boxes the food was delivered to them in, so they were all different sizes. Also they had lots of paper bags, with blue stripes, which you would tear off for smaller things. We used to use them for party bags.

Paper bags that fell apart as soon as you put a tin of beans in them.

You also need to remember that the supermarket is a relatively new thing as well. A generation or two ago people went to the butchers to get their meat, separate fruit and veg shop etc. So there wasn't as much of a need to keep things hygienically separately wrapped etc.

Cardboard straws. There's a fascinating (honest!) article about the history of straws in DH's engineering magazine this month. They were cardboard with wax or parafin coating before modern plastic ones.

Bring own Cloth bags the shopkeeper filled up for you with things like flour or porridge oats, that was before disposable paper bags provided by vendor.

Teeth: can rub clean with a soft cloth.
Strawberries loose or in cardboard trays.

In much of the world (including modern south Korea) people live in tiny premises with no kitchen so they go out to street sellers for any prepared food. Sit down there, probably outside seating, to eat using porcelain or maybe cardboard plates provided by vendor. Not super hygienic in places like Burkina Faso but if you live there you've had all the local bugs already. A good thing is that the food isn't packaged up in 16 different ways to take home, it's come out of giant bags & boxes so less packaging over all.

Yoghurt didn't really become a thing here till the 1970's I believe.

Did cleaning products come in glass too?

I’m in my 60’s, and I remember before we had a supermarket in my London suburb. We took a string bag to the greengrocer, who poured loose muddy potatoes in the bottom and sat unwrapped veg such as cabbage on top.
Meat was wrapped in greaseproof paper, then a white paper outer parcel. You were asked if you wanted your rabbits with head on or off. They came in their fur, and needed gutted at home. You carried them loose.
Fish and chips were in greaseproof paper with layers of newspaper outside to insulate them.
Peas were sold still in their pods, so just chucked loose into your shopping bag. As a kid it was my job to sit on the back step and pod them all into a colander ready to wash and cook.
Chocolate bars wwre wrapped in foil or came in cardboard boxes.
Bread was loose on the baker’s shelves, and they wrapped it in white paper when they handed it to you. Buns went in paper bags.
Eggs were in cardboard cartons that you took back to the shop to reuse.
Milk was delivered in glass bottles.
We shopped daily (no freezer, and limited storage space), so didn’t need tons of plastic bags.
One small dustbin, about half the size of a wheelie bin, easily contained all the week’s waste from a family of four, and that included all the ashes from the open fire.

I always ask for boxes from anyone stocking the shelves in supermarkets. My Sainsburys has a stash of boxes near the tills. They are small wine boxes but still usable.

In the seventies the meat, veg and fish vans used to come out to the villages to sell.

One small dustbin, about half the size of a wheelie bin, easily contained all the week’s waste from a family of four, and that included all the ashes from the open fire.

I really wish I could get to that! But the totfallt wave of plastic is immense unless I shop at the fancy and expensive “no packaging” shops! Aldi isn’t all that great for the environment.

You didn’t buy stuff from big supermarkets that sell in bulk. And it wasn’t prepackaged in airtight packaging to last for weeks. Food came from small local shops where it was wrapped in paper by a real person. The shop was close enough to shop little and often. There’s no way to return to that because most of the small shops have been put out of business.

I suppose cleaning products would have come in cardboard boxes, as powder to be mixed with water, or as hard soap or whatever. There would not have been such a range of different sprays. Polish of course in metal tins. The squeezy plastic bottles for Washing up liquid have been around for a while though.

I recall from 70's I think most cleaning products were bars or powders so paper wraps & boxes. Yoghurts I only remember coming out in the 70's so that was SKI yoghurt. And then Bejams opened with all its new frozen delights mostly in boxes but things like frozen mousse in plastic tubs. Milk in bottles and the Alpine man with truck and fizzy drinks delivery returning bottles weekly 😁
General shopping was as @Babdoc says all chucked in string bag and wrapped in paper when needed.

I used to eat Ski yoghurts as a child in the late 60s and they came in plastic pots, I guess that was the beginning of it all. We had Tupperware containers too (mind you, I still have some of them). As people have said, huge supermarkets didn't exist, milk came in glass bottles, as did "pop". I remember using cling film for the first time (about 1977) and my sandwiches were wrapped in it. Fruit & veg came in brown bags from the greengrocer & yes, later when supermarket shopping was more common there were always boxes by the till.

Anyone remember bottle deposits? Drinks and pop came in glass bottles and you could get 10p back if you returned them. Funnily enough I was at my Mum's the other week. She is a hoarder. She also makes her own squash from fruit from the garden. One of the bottles she was re-using was an old Corona bottle with the 10p deposit lid. It must be 40 years old and still going strong!!

Cleaning products: my mum used a sort of cardboard box/tube of Vim but I don't remember anything other than cans of polish. I would say plastic bottles of flash etc have been around for a long time.

Some large sized yoghurt still came in waxed cardboard well into the 2000s. I used to use them as fire lighters in my wood burner. (Yeo Valley? )

As a child in the 80s I remember fruit and veg in brown paper bags from the greengrocer and fizzy drinks in glass bottles that could be returned for a few pence.

How far back do you want to think about?

Within my grandmother's lifetime? She shopped daily. Local produce only. She took her own cloth bags for food from the greengrocer. Meat was wrapped in butcher's paper and tied with string. Strawberries were grown in the garden. Fish from fishmonger again wrapped in paper. Grandad shot rabbits and my mum recalls them hanging on the back of the kitchen door. The garden was given over to food production and a pigeon doo'cot. Open fire which some waste was burned on. Compost heap for the garden. Toys for the children were very few and made of wood or metal. My mum recalls the amazing treat of an apple and satsuma each in the Christmas stocking which was a sock. Granny made the clothes and they were passed down.

She had 13 living children and a husband. Her life was in the home with church on Sunday. She had a mother, sisters and aunts all living locally to support her.

At her funeral, I learned she was the village 'food bank' before such a thing existed as it does today. She would feed any child who turned up hungry at her door. They got a plate of Scotch broth and a slice of bread.

She did use Government issued baby formula milk though rather than breastfeed. You can see that in the birth rate - 15 live births in 20 years. Breastfeeding might've reduced her fertility.

There was not nearly the plethora of cleaning stuff we have now. There was Ajax powder in a cardboard tube, and lots of elbow grease! My Gran thought 'liquid gumption' which did come in a squeezy plastic bottle was the latest word in cleaning (I've got no idea what it actually was). Old clothes were cut up for rags and dusters. We used newspaper on glass. Washing up brushes had wooden handles and wooden heads that were replaceable. Clothes washing was done with soap flakes in a cardboard box, or you could grate your own! Cleaning did take a lot more effort.

Milk came is glass bottles, so did lemonade and squash and then they were recycled

Toothpaste came in a metal tube with a little plastic cap

A lot of cleaning powders came in cardboard tubes with plactic or metal lids (like a cocoa 'tin')

So many of these could be reintroduced and combined with natural plastics which biodegrade we could be plastic free within a few years with significant investment

Jam, golden syrup, treacle manage it - but I specificall bought baking powder and bicarb last week in a cardboard tube and bugger me inside was a plastic bag!! but disappointed

I'm 35 and remember a fair few of these. We used to buy eggs from the egg farm in the village too.

I don't know just how we'd get back to it today. Plastic packaging is ubiquitous and our lifestyles are quite different. I could have gone to the local butcher and bought sausages for dinner and then the grocer for potatoes. My mum still does, but DD and I have had a lazy breakfast then played with toys in our pyjamas whilst I have lifted sausages out of the freezer and we'll be having them with frozen mash and vegetables. That would seem exeptionally lazy even 20 years ago.

I feel obliged to do it like that mostly and going to the shops is a bit of a treat/expidition to DD, whereas my preschool years were mainly exclusively traipsing to the shops for that night's dinner then watching the cleaning. Not much sitting on the floor playing with mummy.

Did no one else get their strawberries in little, delicate wooden punnets? I remember looking forward to those (rare) summer treats and a child and often played happily with the wooden punnets or used them for toy storage until they broke.

I’m only 37 yet I remember strawberries coming in cardboard punnets and mushrooms in a paper bag. Cleaning products were either boxes or tins.

Same as Babdoc, but I'm older at 71. Daily shopping as no fridge back in the 50's. String bag for the greengrocer's, potatoes, carrots and greens went in loose, fruit packed in brown paper bags - we also bought our vinegar there, straight from a barrel into your own bottle. Meat from the butchers was wrapped in grease proof and white paper. Anything liquid - drinks or cleaning products were in glass bottles. No yoghurts back then. Sainsbury's sold cheese cut from the block and wrapped in grease proof, ditto bacon sold loose. All food waste was wrapped in newspaper for the dustbin as were the ashes from open fires. In fact, we had pig bins on every street in the early 50s which was part of the war effort, into which food scraps were left to feed the pigs, I can't remember when that stopped.

It must surely be possible to reintroduce some of this.

Expensive squash comes in glass bottles (Rocks)

so do some desserts (Gu?) and some fools are still in waxes cups