When to Get Rid of Deli Containers
TerraCycle Include USA Loop
I have a slightly complicated relationship with my deli containers. I have a drawerful that made their way in via deli soups, meal kits, and supermarket olives, and most of them have been in there...forever? Some may have turned cloudy. Others absorbed the myriad smells of foods they’ve since held.
I greatly value them for their usefulness: as vessels for bulk grains, soups, the giant potato I parboiled but didn’t use immediately. “If you are in possession of the full range—a quart, pint, half-pint—you basically have a container to suit every storage need,” says Allison Bruns Buford, Food52’s Test Kitchen Director, ex-catering maven, and deli container fan. They’re so easily stacked in the fridge, she adds, and there’s “nothing quite like eating straight out of one.”
As Buford suggests, deli containers are not only choice dinnerware, but practically appendages for most chefs, especially with glass being off-limits in most food service kitchens. Jeremy Umansky, author of Koji Alchemy, and chef-owner of Larder in Cleveland, loves them for their durability, reusability, ease of storage—and low cost. Umansky uses them not just for storing “all types of foods from sauces to dried rice,” but also to store small kitchen equipment that may easily go missing or break, like blades for meat grinders, small plating spoons, even small screwdrivers and Allen wrenches. A catch-all, if you will.
But to me—and this is where the complication arises—plastic containers also are a reminder of wastefulness. If you don’t watch out, you can accumulate more than you can find use for. I watch closely how many I let into my home—limiting takeout, and bringing containers for bulk purchases—and reuse them dutifully. But how many reuses is too much? And where do they end up when I recycle them? I went looking for answers.