Why do Americans use paper plates?

[fifteenohfour]

Any Americans here? or people who have been there enough to know why?

I love looking at the thanksgiving hashtag on instagram, the food they have is always immense and looks amazing to me. Especially their mac and cheese and pumpkin pie.

What I don't get is that nearly 90% of these videos they are all eating off paper plates? In the UK I eat off paper plates at a picnic or at a venue birthday like when you hire a hall out and have a party. None of my friends or family throughout my whole life have ever eaten off paper plates at home and if you go deeper into American food posts on instagram it's actually an everyday thing for them?? They eat off paper plates for every meal it blows my mind.

I grew up on a council estate and myself and my friends/family we are all working class so it's not like I have a warped sense of food and drink serving. i just never see it over here?

It's bugging me! Do they have amazing recycling facilities that allow them to use so much single use items? One family said they went through 40 paper plates EVERY DAY!!! Because of their 6 kids having one for every single snack they ate.

Also single use cups hot drinks in offices. My former US company did this. I felt upset by the waste every time I visited. I don’t understand how there seems to be no awareness of this in the US.

I have never come across this ever. Have never eaten at the house of any of our many friends and family in the US over many years and been served on paper plates.

If it happens at all, it’s occasional. We used disposable plates for our (UK) Thanksgiving because we had 19 people in total for dinner and didn’t have that many dinner plates. Just as it’s the norm to use paper plates at a BBQ party. It doesn’t reflect how most British people eat the rest of the time.

@Squashpocket yeah you can see on the videos that the plates don't really function anymore, they are overloaded and soggy, sagging. I haven't seen that much disposable cutlery used, usually metal knifes and forks, I have seen plastic cups but that's not nearly as common as the plates. I did see someone post a video bragging about all the juice they set up for their kids, these fancy fruit juices in kegs on the counter they had three kegs massive things, with different flavours and stacks and stacks of plastic cups , easily 100 cups, next to it and it wasn't a party they were showing how much fruit their fussy toddler eats in a day by making it into a fun juice. I watch one video and then before you know it your entire feed is videos like that.

@dreamingbohemian oh man where do I start, one family is southern and shows their Sunday dinners.

So I'm desperate to try pumpkin pie, sausage and gravy with biscuits. Collared greens??

Mac and cheese. There is one dish that's like a gumbo? Spicy boiled seafood with loads of corn. Oh cornbread!! I really want to try cornbread. There are loads. Pecan Pie with cream. Tater tot pie?! Root beer float. I just really want to go to America and be cooked for by a suburban/southern family.

It’s the strangest thing isn’t it! I dated a guy from Florida once upon a time and whenever I was visiting him and his family they only ever used paper plates. Even if it was just my ex making himself some food- he’d pull the paper plates out. I’m not even sure if they owned normal plates. I always felt so bad for just throwing it away after every meal!

Ive lived in the US for 20 years and have never met anyone who uses paper plates on a daily basis. Yes at children’s birthday parties and the occasional festive meal/bbq when you have more people than you own plates. We have great recycling programs and most people use their own coffee mugs and just get them refilled at Starbucks etc.

Im sure there are other parts of the States where paper plates are more the cultural norm and there is less recycling.

Please could everyone remember that the USA has approx 330 million people living in it and a VERY diverse social and cultural mix. It is very rude to typecast the entire population.

I'd say supermarket packaging is as bad in Europe as the UK. I live in one EU country and regularly visit two others. They tend to charge for landfill rubbish but take recycling for free. So it makes sense to cut down on your own packaging and recycle as much as possible. But the UK eats a lot of fast food which is heavily packaged.

Agree with this last paragraph. I live in the US and we don't use paper plates except for big gatherings. Our recycling isn't great but we do recycle, we have to pay extra for the recycling. Apparently in our area, recycling was a big thing a few years ago but it got too expensive for the companies and people didn't want to pay it. I don't think a certain previous president helped with his aversion to all things green.

Where were you staying, Motel 6?

Bring your own mug like most of us do.

I'm American (though haven't lived there for 10+ years) and honestly, I cannot remember ever eating off paper plates except for a birthday party or a picnic. I definitely don't recall it at Christmas, etc.

That said, Christmas/Thanksgiving meals are often huge family events. When one side of our family did it, it wouldn't be unusual to have 15-20 people. When they other side did, it could easily be 40. While I don't remember eating off paper plates, I totally see why we might have. My extended family is very working class living in small houses (had tables set up all through the ground floor to squeeze everyone in), I can't imagine they had money or space for 40 dinner plates, 40 dessert plates, 40 glasses, plus cutlery, so I'm not sure really where those came from.

It is not the ‘norm’ .

im American and have never seen this! None of my friends or relatives do this.

may be step away from instagram

For the same reason Americans do most things: it's convenient. No thought or care for the effects if this behaviour.

Where were you staying, Motel 6?

Nope. Can't recall the name of it but it was a perfectly nice hotel with a pool in Nashville. Nothing wrong with it apart from the copious amounts of plastic waste. It was part of a chain as I remember emailing the ceo about it via LinkedIn when I got back...may have been a Hilton I think.

Though I suspect what you're seeing is influencers who perhaps don't want to be asked with the washing up because they want to get their videos up and be getting likes and managing their accounts. They probably have the money for disposable everything and therefore just don't care. I think that probably says more about the sorts of people who are all about social media than anything.

I think your clue is in the word Thanksgiving.
This is party or celebration food.

Whenever I have seen the paper plate thing, it's always the absurdly large families who do it on the daily.

There is a mum of 10 (I think) who films herself making breakfast and lunch boxes morning and its always paper plates. I seem to recall the Duggars always used paper plates too?

Do you often cast xenophobic aspersions about a whole country using false information? Although these comments are exactly what the op wanted when starting the thread. The faux naïveté is very tiresome.

Also American and I've never seen this except at barbecues and really large casual parties, so maybe it's a regional thing? I've certainly never seen it in a hotel. Is it possible, depending on when this was, that it was a covid/staffing issue?

I'm certainly not arguing that the US is a model of green living, but the UK (where we now live) really isn't either. To the best of my knowledge there are just as high a percentage of Americans making the same small changes in their own lives as there are here. And, not to bring Brexit into this, but anyone voting for that, so just over 50% of the population, was voting to allow the loosening of all kinds of environmental safeguards and restrictions, not to mention trade deals that involve shipping and flying our food across the world instead of across the channel, so I think you can assume environmental concerns aren't at the top of their priority list.

8 US states have banned single use plastic bags, by the way.

I notice that you are generalising hugely and also adopt the rather lazy and judgemental comment that it's normally the"7" kid families you watch who do this...

For what it's worth I have also lived in America for many years and no paper plates except the usual BBQ ones were used. The state I was in also had excellent recycling where you had to sort out all the plastics, so they could be recycled separately.

Here we are again. Spouting shit about Americans.

Paper plates are not the norm, though I won’t deny that they get used more than elsewhere.

thanksgiving is a special situation. Often people are hosting more people than they have plates for. This is especially true once you account for multiple courses and dessert. There are dish rental services, but they cost a small fortune and you have to wash everything and pay for breakage. Alternatively you can a small amount for a stack of paper plates, have enough dishes for the entire crowd, and not spend hours washing dishes. I use real dishes because I view the meal as an elevated occasion, but paper plates are a rational decision for a large crowd.

most hotels had switched to reusable products. They switched back to disposable during Covid and have not gone back to reusable yet. We mostly stay in places that serve a breakfast buffet and those have changed significantly. What used to be communally prepped trays of food, like eggs and bacon, are now packaged things you can grab. They have mostly removed things that create repeated touch points or people lingering at a spot.

Around here if it's a large gathering like Thanksgiving, often the host will ask some of the guests (family) to bring extra plares, bowls ot whatever is needed. I've never seen paper plates at Thanksgiving.

I think it’s probably regional and also somewhat influenced by class.

my ex husband was born on the AL/GA border so has family in those two states as well as neighbouring TN.
Paper plates are absolutely the norm in his huge extended family.

They are what would be unkindly stereotyped as ‘trailer trash’ or ‘good ol boys’.

The food I enjoyed off those paper plates was amazing. I miss cornbread and collard greens. They can keep the grits tho!

Weirdly, they all routinely use thermal mugs and would never use throwaway coffee cups so it’s inconsistent from an eco point of view, although it’s consistent from a convenience point of view (presumably the screw on lids/handles are better for in car use and they all drive quite long distances to work).

My ex MIL had very few cabinets in her kitchen (and enormous fridge, plus another fridge on the front porch) so didn’t have the same sort of spaces for crockery storage that we do.

I lived in the states for 8 months, I don’t remember ever eating from a disposable plate/bowl and I very regularly ate at colleagues homes, went to cook outs etc. Our office issued all staff with a reusable coffee mug, where as the UK branches remain as disposable paper cups.