Tall Tales

Food.

To be more specific, I don’t like the way the characters are shown eating their food.

Before I go on a rant and face down brickbats from fans of the series, let me tell you all up front that I am a huge fan of TBBT.Being a  geek myself I identify  in some ways with the characters and their idiosyncrasies, especially their propensity to lecture on geeky topics like the particle-wave nature of light.

I don’t really get most of the comic book references but Schrödinger’s cat and Einstein’s relativity are right up my alley.

What can I say, except that I am a science nerd.

I also happen to think that Sheldon’s “Bazinga!” is a hoot.

And I get Sheldon’s pain about Windows 7 being more user friendly and less a pain in the ass than Windows Vista.

However,what gets my goat and makes me flinch visibly every time is when they sit down and eat.Their dinner conversation is witty and their food choices are eclectic-Thai, Indian (when Koothrappali is not around) and Chinese.The regular pizza, hamburgers, chips and coke also make frequent appearances on the menu, which is fine by me.

My only problem is with the amount of waste generated.

The characters in TBBT seem to be big fans of the philosophy of take-out. And apparently since this is America you can’t have take outs without the food being packaged in plastic containers and chopsticks and eaten with plastic spoons and forks.

All that plastic,all over the country,daily

So, every time they eat take out they bring home a whole load of disposable plastic which will be presumably thrown away after the meal is done.And since eating isn’t an once a week chore and none of the guys have any cooking skills it’s safe to assume that there is a regular traffic of disposable cutlery night after night from their living rooms to the dumpster.

Plates for waste

It’s usually a fallacy to assume that depictions in popular media are an accurate representation of the behaviour of a population.After all, women in Indian families don’t really wear heavy gold jewellery and expensive silk saris and sit around conspiring against one another.

But if you look at the US Municipal Solid Waste statistics I guess Chuck Lorre/Bill Prady has a point. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency an average person in the US generates 4.5 pounds(2 kgs) of municipal solid waste per day in 2008.

Furthermore this infographic from an EPA report shows that this waste has been increasing over the years, though there has been a minute drop from 2007 to 2008 if you consider a single person.

Of this 4.5 pounds of solid waste generated by an average American (and by an average citizen of developed countries,give or take a few pounds) EPA figures that about 1.5 pounds(around 680 gms) of waste is recycled or composted.

Continents of Plastic

Therefore, every day,every person throws away 1.36kg of solid waste .Most of this is non biodegradable in the form of plastics and they find their way into municipal landfills,rivers and seas.

Speaking of seas,there is even a Great Pacific Garbage Patch stretching from Japan to US that is almost twice the size of France and at places around 100 feet deep.Think of  anything made of plastic and lighter than water-bottles,caps, pens, stockings,packaging, bags- and you will find tons of them in this vast plastic soup.

Imagine this,only extending hundreds of kilometers around

Apart from polluting the oceans and messing up with marine biology plastic finds its way into the food chain of aquatic animals and has been known to cause deaths to birds and fishes.

Back to my original train of thought.The characters in TBBT are shown to be geeks,smart and logical.Changing their cutlery,reducing the usage of plastic and by extension,their carbon footprint will be one of the smartest things they could do.

That would make them sexier too, since we all know that smart is the new sexy.

Even Sheldon, who is averse to change dumped the Soup Plantation routine when he loved the hamburgers in The Cheesecake Factory. I doubt that he would throw a hissy fit and give up the Chicken Satay if Siam Palace was to make the take out packaging more environmentally friendly.

Or maybe he would,but ultimately come around and see the logic.Hmmm,now that story, with appropriate plot twists could be the material for an entire episode.

And now that this is off my chest, I am going back to watching the 4th episode of the 2nd season.

For the fifth time.