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.

Exactly.

Paper plates aren't the norm.
Recycling efforts aren't national, they're local. Some places have recycling programmes as stringent as the UK, have outlawed single use plastics in restaurants & food service, etc. Some have not.
States are beginning to ban single use plastic carrier bags.

Generalising based off of Instagram posts isn't a great idea, given posters are a self-selected population and viewers a second set of self-selectors, which will really skew your views.

What an arrogant, ignorant thing to say.

You sound terribly limited and narrow.

How long until someone posts that she knows for a fact that the Duchess of Sussex used only paper plates at Frogmore Cottage?

Is that the last square on your "faux naiveite American bashing thread" bingo card today? 😆I still have a few to go....

It was more common during Covid, but is certainly not the norm except at huge holiday gatherings, as others have said, and where I live, people take recycling and not wasting resources extremely seriously.

This is what I would imagine happens.

As far as I’m aware, lots of American households go to loads of effort to produce a really nice thanksgiving dinner, and to dress the table nicely. I just can’t imagine that it’s very common to serve it all on paper plates (and disposable cutlery too presumably).

I’m sure you could find examples of British families who eat Christmas dinner on paper plates too. But I’m not sure looking at a couple of families on social media (who may well be jumping on a paper plates as life hack bandwagon) is indicative of what most people are doing.

This is a very generalized statement.

My US office works the same way as my UK ones did, using china mugs.

We recycle with collections every week. Electric cars are quite common with charging stations at most supermarkets.

Paper plates are used for large multi family gatherings at celebrations but not at other times.

I had never realised (before reading this thread) that using paper plates was the norm in the US.

You are getting the notion that it's the norm from yet one more American-bashing thread on MN?

It's not the norm. No one I know eats Thanksgiving dinner from paper plates. Or any other dinner, for that matter. A picnic yes. Ordinary meals on an everyday basis, no. Festive meals, never.

I went to America. And saw what they did. And the cars they drive and felt like what was the point in me washing up my yoghurt pots

You observed the habits of 330 million Americans?

Must have been there for a while, to visit every state and every region and blend them into this nonexistent homogenous "they."

I love MN. They'll believe literally anything about America. No one uses paper plates as normal. Americans have more food related gatherings and do actually open their doors to people which is a bit of a culture shock to most of MN. But normal people, not weirdos on YouTube, do not do this.

As for how the poor UK is working away at recycling but having it all negated by the terrible wasteful Americans.... are you fucking kidding me? We don't even do deposits on bottles here. Everything is fucking plastic, have any of you ever been to another country?

have any of you ever been to another country?
They don't need to. They can learn everything they need to know from Instagram.

I have American friends and it's because they host a thanksgiving that's more of a "drop in" thing where they are. So anyone could turn up at any time and it's more of a buffet dinner than a proper sit down affair. In fact, she told me once to bring my own plate, so I presume many do multiple thanksgivings and xmases in a day 🤣

I've wondered this too. I follow quite a few you tubers who have cupboards dedicated to disposables, they even use disposible oven ware. Is it much cheaper in the US?
Apart from a BBQ/picnic or emergency situation I'd hate to eat a special occasion meal on a paper/plastic plate.

I wash yogurt pots, the Americans around me all do, they get recycled weekly.
I have a larger car here than in the UK but I take more driving than flying holidays.
Paper bags are the norm for groceries and there is a single use bag tax on any bag used so most people bring their own.
There isn't one American way of doing things, it is a large country with many different States.

"They" mostly can't get around without cars due to the size of the country, the terrain and the weather.

Meanwhile in the UK most people drive short distances despite it being small and easily navigated by foot or bus. Ask anyone that lives near a village school.

American children generally take buses to school.

Imagine for a second you live in a country where you could actually have BBQs on a fairly regular basis or even year round. You might also have some of these things in a cupboard in your home. Especially if you had space for a cupboard that could store the stuff

I know it's terrible and shocking but different countries have different cultures and weather

I’m confused by the implication in lots of these posts that the UK is great at recycling and single use plastic isn’t a thing.

Are people talking about a different UK?

They're living in a different UK to me.

DH and I visited (near vermont, and then rural new york) and when staying with friends who had cleaners and house keeping staff we used paper plates! It's just an easy thing for them, they didn't seem to care to lay the table nicely so often we ate on stools at the kitchen island always with paper plates. We had silverware but they used plastic and they didn't have a full set of a metal forks. It seems to be an issue among all classes and lifestyles.

The same with every country I've ever lived in (obviously except the UK) me with my cloth bags for life, I get all the looks. They think I'm the crazy one!

www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/30/us-and-uk-citizens-are-worlds-biggest-sources-of-plastic-waste-study

@PumpkinPooSpice but they aren't using them for bbqs, they are eating dinner off them.

Ten years ago. That was the same in the UK ten years ago too. You could go into any small shop and buy a snickers and be given a bag for it.