Throw Away Your Tupperware

When the best solution is also the laziest

In my younger and more vulnerable years, I was convinced the key to success was decanting everything you owned into a mason jar. Some people blame the impulse on Pinterest. I blame restaurants. In the early aughts, every restaurant, no matter the price point or cuisine, had a purely decorative jar of roasted red peppers that had been canned sometime during the George W. Bush administration. The fanciest restaurants—the belles of the Ball—also had a gallon jar with a single serving of dried linguini.

I scoured garage sales and grandparents’ basements for those jars so I could enter my Rustic Rococo phase. I was desperate to prove to the world that I had my shit together—that I was a person of elegance and sophistication.

I was not, of course, a person of elegance and sophistication. I was an underemployed fuck-up coasting through grad school writing offputting and unpublishable short stories about jellyfish. But I’ve always tried the hardest to puff myself up when I felt the most insignificant, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

I gave up on elegant food storage after I ruined a quart of good whiskey. My mom, a small-town Iowa librarian, had been given a handle of bootleg Templeton Rye by a mysterious patron for secret reasons.¹ It was, according to the patron, the Good Shit, the shit the founders' family made for themselves. Mom let me siphon some of it into a soda bottle, and I toted it back to KC with reverence.

I was convinced that that whiskey was the nicest thing I would ever own. At the time, I was dead broke and living in a shitty apartment complex called The Alpine, which, much like the real Alps, was drafty and inhospitable to the poor. I wasn’t about to keep my most prized possession in a recycled soda bottle. So I cleaned out the most elegant and sophisticated mason jar in my collection—a tall, etched vessel that until that day had contained a batch of homemade half-sour pickle spears. I scrubbed the jar furiously—twice!—and decanted the Templeton into it with more care than I had ever shown a living being.  

Then, I invited my friends over for a Fancy Party Thrown By A Child. I don’t remember the night super well, but I’m sure I put on Ella Fitzgerald and lit a bright-red Dollar Tree candle with a scent like “APPLE BUKKAKE.” I do remember the look on my friend Christine’s face when I handed her a glass of the Good Shit. She took a sip. She hesitated, lips parted as she hunted for the right thing to say.

“It’s nice,” she said, being nice. “Sort of…pickle-y.”

My heart plummeted. I took a sip. The rye no longer tasted like rye. It tasted like a half-sour.²

A few years later, I got a Real Job and moved into a bigger apartment. I celebrated by upgrading my food storage ~solution~ to a set of matching plastic containers from Costco. The set had some weirdly masculine name, like SNACKVAULT, and cost something exorbitant, like $30. Still, I was convinced that I’d done it right this time. The set was well-reviewed by Wirecutter (at the time, The Sweethome). The containers looked like the kind you see in fridge ads—clean-lined, sturdy, horny to be filled with celery.

I hated those goddamn containers. They were all different sizes and shapes, which meant that none of them stacked. Plus, each container had its own color-coded lid, which I lost instantly. The #snackvaults stayed neatly arranged in my kitchen cupboard for exactly one week before violently reproducing and sponging up every centimeter of kitchen real estate.

Look, I support the Wirecutter union, and I am immensely grateful for all of their testing and reviews. I am grateful for all reviews and tutorials and explainers, because I am a person who needs to be taught and explained to frequently. But it is also true that I resent them. Knowledge is power, yes, but can also feel disempowering. Because I know smarter people than me have done their homework on what fridgeshoesknifeblenderdayplannervibratorbouillon to buy, consulting them starts to feel mandatory for even the lowest-stakes decision.

And having a home stocked with the “right” consumer goods doesn’t make me feel better. I’m still disappointed by things—maybe more so, because I expected them to work. At the same time, I lose out on the small, secret pleasure that comes from stumbling onto a great thing by accident—from feeling like I’ve cracked the code before anyone else. Or better yet, from realizing that I already have what I need.

And I do already have what I need. I have take-out containers.³

It took me years to figure out what every restaurant worker knows: that take-out containers are the only Tupperware worth using. They’re stackable, they’re top-rack dishwasher safe, and they come in three sizes—half-pint, pint, and quart—all of which nest within one another for storage and all of which use the same size lid.

Behold how they stack neatly in the fridge, as I have done here. Do not ask what is in the half-pint container.

Besides being the perfect size for storing a small amount of broth and a single bean, the half-pint container is ideal for organizing spices you tend to use a lot of. Think about the spices you measure out rather than shake optimistically over a frying pan—whole spices like allspice berries or bay leaves that would be useless in a shaker, anyway.

In the early stages of the pandemic, I went to town with a bunch of old deli containers and a label maker and I haven’t looked back.

I am not a person for whom organization comes naturally, but I do use it recreationally when my life feels out of control.

I don’t think about my Tupperware anymore, which makes me happier than I can express. These puppies are better than any container you can buy. You can buy them, of course, but the more eco-friendly, economical, and delicious route is to just keep the ones you get when you get takeout from Taj Palace or Kin Lin or wherever and sanitize them.

Besides, running out and buying them because some idiot with a newsletter convinced you to misses the point. The point is that you don’t always have to manufacture abundance. Sometimes you can create it with what you already have.

You can decant your life into a mason jar, or you can pour it from a recycled soda bottle. I know which way makes the whiskey taste better.

—

Gift guides are coming, and you can avoid them!

The hottest Christmas gift this year is an (extremely) limited-edition Haterade koozie, and it can be yours for a recommended donation of $6—$5 if you know me IRL and I can save postage by just handing it to you with a Hamm’s inside. The koozies come in black or purple flavors, were screen-printed by the good folks at Inkwell KC, and would look just as nice on a mantelpiece as a manta-ray. Claim yours by sending your address, color preference, and scratch to:

Venmo: @lizcookkc | CashApp: $lizcookkc | PayPal: lizcook.kc@gmail.com

As always, if you’d like to support the worst food newsletter in Missouri, share this post or send it to a friend. It makes a huge difference, and I really appreciate it.

1. My mother is a very funny and kind woman, but she is also a bit propriety-obsessed. On Sunday, I will get a call from her about this newsletter. “ELIZABETH,” she will say, affecting a Hyacinth Bucket voice to mask her real annoyance. “You’re going to make people think I’m a LAWBREAKER.”

2. I have a dishwasher now, so my mason jars are much cleaner, and you can come over and drink out of them. I still keep a few on hand for ferments or medium-term cold storage—I’ve noticed my cocktail syrups last a lot longer in glass jars than plastic, for example, and this probably explains why.

3. Did I just write a 700-word lede to tell you to use take-out containers? I did. Welcome to Substack, baby.