The Curse of Vacuum Packaging
Adeline loves food, lots of it and often, both at home and out and about. Usually, that goes well, but sometimes it doesn’t. In the Sunday Roast series, she shares her observations. This week: the danger of vacuum packaging.
On the shelf of my supermarket was a very inviting deal featuring three types of cheese, cozily arranged from blue to brie. The three cheeses were in a plastic box and had also been vacuum-packed in a little plastic jacket. Quite a lot of plastic for my personal taste, but even I’m not immune to a magical three for five deal. So they came home with me to support the cheese board with friends that afternoon.
Bloodbath above your snacks
I rolled some tartare balls, cut stalks of celery and cobbled together some dips. Just as the doorbell was basically ringing, I decided to quickly take the cheese—which, naturally, had already been sitting outside the fridge for a while, stinking up the place—out of its packaging. This is the most dangerous thing you can do at such a moment. Really, the packaging says: ‘come on, come on, come on, I’ll make sure you create one more bloodbath over your delicious snacks and across your fresh outfit, under everyone’s watchful eye’.
Sharpest knife in the drawer
While you half-wave to your friends—we don’t kiss anymore because: corona—you study which corner of the vacuum pack might be suitable. You turn it around, inspect the cheese from every angle, search for a tiny imperfection in the shiny plastic and conclude that there actually isn’t one. Then you start stabbing at it without completely mashing the cheese to smithereens. As a result, you make your first thrust at the most inconvenient spot, with the least chance of damaging and removing the packaging, meaning you have to repeat the process on at least two more sides of the cheese. Cutting away from yourself doesn’t work for a damn in this case, so you’re wielding the sharpest knife in the drawer toward yourself. And then three times over…
Production little club
It’s like kitchen scissors in custom-sealed packaging. You buy a pair because your old scissors cut like sh*t, and then how the hell are you supposed to get them out, huh? I always picture some little production club above the design table, shouting: ‘ha-ha-ha, and do you know what we’ll put them in?’ Just like those steaks aged for so many days, by the way—another beast of a thing.
Packaging-free state
In Copenhagen, there’s Jægersborggade, a packaging-free street in the Nørrebro district. And whenever I’m hacking open packaging like that at risk to my own life, I always think somewhat melancholically of how everyone there went grocery shopping with their own containers, bottles and bags. Though in the case of cheese, of course, it does make your entire shopping bag stink before you even get home.
I survived these three cheeses without a scratch, but when I quickly put something in the dishwasher that evening, the tip of the cheese knife got its revenge by stabbing extremely hard into my finger. Fucking cheese.
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