Brown bags: then and now
When I was in Jr. high, like most kids, my mom packed my lunch in a brown paper bag. (Note: we’re talking mid 70’s in the midwest, so lunch was a sandwich made from wonder bread with some sort of processed cheese of lunch meat, snack of doritos, cheetos, fritos or other processed junk, and either a ding-dong, ho-ho or apple for dessert… amazing that I survived.)
In my family, it was important to bring home the brown bag, since being wasteful was not acceptable. I always found that particularly annoying, since my friends were able to throw theirs away, while I neatly folded mine and snuck it back into my backpack.
Today, this same scenario would have a totally different meaning. Firstly, brown bags should be outlawed, since we should all be using reusable bags. Secondly, throwing away a perfectly good bag is a sign of an “environmental pig”. I read somewhere on the web that the US uses more than 10 billion brown bags annually (according to the American Forest and Paper Association)! That probably includes those used in supermarkets by those environmentally conscious people that opt paper rather than plastic, (again - think reusable) but still, that’s an awful lot of trees.
These days, I proudly carry a reusable, foldable “Whole Foods” bag in my purse at all times. Many Israeli’s think I’ve flipped, and am trying to hang on to anything that will let me continue to live Silicon Valley. In many cases they’re right 
, but in this case, I’m actually trying to be a local trend setter. After all, I’ve been doing this since 6th grade…
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