Extreme food packaging
This is a warning to those who may be tempted to buy a rice noodle bowl from Thai Kitchen. Just don’t do it. You will become an accessory after the fact. The crime? Extreme food packaging.
This tempting little bowl of mostly nutritious and/or harmless food, found in a variety of supermarkets for an attractive price (too attractive me thinks now), is an abomination of package design. What you get, other than 1762mg of sodium, is a cardboard surround with a dishwasher and microwave safe No. 5 plastic bowl inside. The plastic bowl is sealed in plastic film which requires a knife or sharp edge to open. The plastic bowl also has a thick peel-away seal much like a yogurt tub. Under this lid is the dish’s inner sanctum where a bed of dried rice noodles (rice, water, tapioca starch) lies in want of hot water. But there is also a slightly mysterious plastic package along with the noodles, which upon further examination and reading of the cooking instructions on the cardboard surround proves to be the seasoning and oil packets. There are three of them neatly wrapped inside another plastic packet, which means the oil and spices are buried five layers deep. That’s more secure than Tylenol. I wonder if nuclear waste is so well contained?
Perhaps worst of all, this is a “product of Thailand,” which means a series of smog-belching Asian factories stamped out the packaging materials and their contents, perhaps putting them all together as well, to be shipped across the Pacific Ocean on a gigantic cargo vessel, hauled to a food distribution center, trucked to my local supermarket, and put on sale for a couple bucks so I could have something to eat for lunch at my desk while continuing to perform my “knowledge work” without stopping. Sheesh.