Do you like popcorn? I like popcorn. It’s a fairly healthy snack if you don’t load it up with junk. Probably one of the lowest calorie snack foods around. How many of you have been eating microwave popcorn out of a bag? Okay, I see your hands. How many have been doing this for years and years because our old air poppers and oil poppers are messy, inconvenient, etc? Me too. That’s a lot of bags, a lot of wrappers, a lot of carboard boxes. Plus, there is that somewhat over the top “Popcorn Lung” thing.

Jess just recently bought this. It’s a popcorn bowl for your microwave. There are no bags, no oil, no chemicals, no nothing. Just a plastic bowl with a lid that is not supposed to close and 1/2 cup of regular old popcorn kernels. 4 minutes later, you have your tasty, healthy snack ready for you to prepare it as lite or as buttery as you want it.

Now…for years we have done it the way everyone does it. And to some I am sure this sounds trivial, but think of how much some of us spend on popcorn vs a big pound bag that is equal to 50 bags of Microwave stuff. Think of how much waste you alone have generated not to mention our collective popcorn bags. The bags aren’t really recyclable because they blend plastic and paper together, and of course there are the extra chemicals which, really, who needs another ingested carcinogen at this point?

I’ll get off the soapbox in just a second, but I felt like this is one of those tiny areas that we as consumers just swallow what we are provided with because it is how things are done. Convenience over Ecology, Disposable over Sustainable. I almost feel like making a rally cry…”The Hell with your microwavable bags! We don’t need you anymore to have quick, healthy, radiated popcorn! We thought it was harder to do than just have a bowl with a loose lid! Now we know! You can never fool us again!”

Who’s with me?

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On another note, as I sit here eating my natural microwaved kernels, I am watching Saturday Night Live resurrect itself from the creative death cloud it has been under for the last few years. Last week’s with Tina Fey was hilarious and there was a bit with the real Huckabee that was sublime. This week Ellen Page tore it up and Wilco (Tweedy is king) played live. Love Wilco. Like adoration level love. The cast and the writers are snapping along too. It’s like the strike just gave them all this pent up angst that they are throwing into their craft. It’s seriously great. I think the cast is pulling out of a long slump as well and I think over the rest of the season they will emerge as another golden era of SNL. Election years are always awesome and I admit that there is a part of me that could stomach Hilary in the white house just to see Amy Poehler riff her each week.

Again with a trite pop culture observation, sorry. Buy Free-trade-organic-Local-green-paraben-free-popcorn…and pop it in a bowl.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 7:22 am and is filed under Environment, Pop Culture, What the heck?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.