Thursday, January 31, 2013

Styrofoam'isms

Today, on the drive back from Sterling, CO after a day of administering nutrition education materials to Kindergarden and 1st graders (gah that phrasing sounds so sterile, like injecting some kind of vaccination, when really we just jumped up and down in front of a bunch of kids and raved about Marty Milk), we stopped at a gas station to grab a pick me up cup of coffee.  I picked a cup off the stack to pour some Mountain Coffee (ironically produced in Nebraska) and realized it was styrofoam. Immediately plopped it back on the pile and grabbed the car keys to trudge back into the wind and cold and dig out the travel mug I'd discarded somewhere in the back of the car under a pile of baskets, papers and posters, because ya know, I can't drink out of a styrofoam cup.

Environmentalism aside, though there is that as a factor, I just cannot stand the taste of styrofoam and coffee. It's nasty and I somehow always end up lightly gnawing on the cup and sucking coffee through the styrofoam. So if I'm going to drink some coffee, be it a craft-brewed latte from Grumpy's in NYC or some swill off the freeway halfway between nowhere and anywhere, I'm not going to risk it touching styrofoam. Though I'll gladly eat up a hearty portion of lentil and sweet potato stew on my walk to class piping hot out of a plastic freezer bag. Because that kind of behavior is acceptable and normal. It's kind of the same way that my dog won't walk through a puddle on the street, but you can put her on the muddiest wettest trail you can find and she is happy as, well, a dog in the mud to splish splash her way along.