Nora Caught Me Buying Plastic Baggies Again

Nora is fifteen, and she counts things. Last April she pulled open the bottom drawer next to my kitchen sink, the one with the foil and the wax paper and the zip-top bags, and she counted them out loud. Forty-one. Then she looked up at me.

I said most of them came from the hardware store on a sale. She said something about the ocean and something about turtles, and I made a noise that I hoped sounded like a grandmother who was listening. A week later I ordered a 4-pack of Stasher reusable silicone bags. I want to be honest about my expectations here: I figured I would use them twice, find them fussy, and go back to the drawer.

That was last spring. The Stasher bags are still in the drawer. The zip-top bags are not.

Here is what actually came in the box, because I got this wrong when I ordered. The 4-pack is one half gallon bag, two sandwich bags, and one snack bag. I looked at that snack bag and thought, well, that was a waste of a bag. It is now the one I reach for most, usually for Caleb, who is twelve and eats constantly and does not need a sandwich the size of his head.

The other thing I got wrong was the seal. I assumed anything without a plastic zipper would leak. I have carried soup in the sandwich bag. I have carried a cut tomato in my tote bag across the gravel lot at the Loveland farmers market and it did not open. You press the seal shut along the top, and that is the entire operation.

The honest part: silicone has some body to it. They are heavier than a baggie and they do not settle flat in a drawer the same way. I had to give them their own corner, and I had to get used to carrying them back into the house, which took about three weeks of leaving them in the car.

One bag replaces 260 single-use plastic bags a year. I did that arithmetic on the back of an envelope and felt a little foolish about the drawer.

The garden is where they earned their keep. I have three raised beds in the backyard and about six weeks each summer when the green beans come in faster than a person can eat them. I used to blanch and freeze them in zip-top bags, doubled up, and by February half of them had freezer burn and went into the compost. Last August I filled the half gallon Stasher bag with beans instead, pressed it shut, and laid it flat overnight before moving it to the shelf. Come January I opened it and the beans were still beans.

The herbs I barely bother with now. Basil and parsley go into the sandwich bag whole and get chopped when I need them, and they hold about a week and a half in the refrigerator, longer than they held in plastic. That is the seal doing its job, not anything clever on my part. The Stasher bags go in the top rack of the dishwasher and come out clean, and the listing says they are safe in the microwave and in the oven up to 425 degrees. I have reheated soup in the half gallon bag, though I still reach for a bowl most days out of habit.

Where they fall short. A bag that held chopped onion will still smell like onion the next morning until it goes through the dishwasher. They take up more room in a lunch sack than a flat baggie, and the half gallon one is wider than anything I used to fold into a drawer. And Caleb has lost two of them at school, which is not the bag's fault, but it is the truth.

One thing that did not work was expecting the snack bag to hold a lunch. It is a snack bag. It holds a snack. I filled it with zucchini slices one morning and Caleb was hungry by ten.

There is one more detail, and it is the reason I am telling you any of this. My daughter packs the kids' lunches some weeks, and she started using the sandwich bags for Caleb's sandwich and for Nora's cut peppers. We have not bought a box of zip-top bags since February. Not out of principle. They simply were not on the list.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would not tell you to empty your drawer on a Tuesday and start over. That is not how anybody changes anything, and I have watched enough neighbors try it with diets and with exercise bikes. I would tell you to buy the 4-pack of Stasher bags, put it where the baggies were, and give it a month. The first two weeks you will forget them and leave them in the car. Then one afternoon you will reach for the bag instead of the box without thinking about it, and that is the whole trick. They are not plastic and they will not behave like plastic. They stand up a little. That takes getting used to, and then you prefer it.