The Very Cool Bowl

“The minute you walked in the deli... I could tell you were a bowl of distinction!”- (with apologies)

The used paper deli cartons had been piling up for some time. We have been eating breakfast of build it yourself salad at our favorite organic vegan deli every morning after our walk for quite awhile now. The cartons are made from recycled cardboard and are the best the deli could find like that, but to be legal with the health department, they were still single use, and plastic coated at that. My walking partner always brought in their own glass bowl, which is allowed at this deli.

I think it is the plastic coatedness that bothers me first. Here I am eating out of cardboard, which is kind of weird, but now I realize I am actually eating out of plastic which is passing as cardboard, even weirder. And then the heap of used single use containers piling up, which I don’t really want to add to the collective world heap of such.

My partners glass bowl seems wrong to me too though, too fragile to carry around to picnic tables and so on.

Metal bowls do not appeal to me either; they smack of camping and ring out like bells. Anyway, I’m slightly metal averse.

Finally I imagine my ideal morning salad bowl. Wood. Wood is sort of self cleaning. I like that wooden cutting boards actually kill germs as they dry in the air, by sucking the moisture out of the microbes with the tiny straw like structures in the wood grain, the same structures that once drew water up into the tree from which the wood formed. After all, I need to reuse this thing day after day, and I may only wipe it out with my napkin after each use.

So wood it is, and I lumpty jolly off to my local second hand store in search of a meal sized bowl made of wood, one without a plastic coating. I figure I will find many to choose from. 

There are some large ones like that, big enough for a salad for the whole family, but I’m looking for a lovely small, thin one, with clean lines, light and round.

But I am surprised and disappointed. By the third thrift store, I finally find one that is the right size. Inside to the bowl, that is. But it is thick and oval and chunky. It looks as if it has been carved from driftwood with stone implements on some faraway tropical island, and then floated across the sea upon the tides. This will have to do, I sigh to myself, unless I want to hire a carver to make one for me, because apparently the kind I imagine is either very rare or prohibitably costly.

The next day I sheepishly haul this monstrosity into the deli and it weighs in at two and a half pounds! Good thing they subtract the weight of your bowl from your salad cost.

So we get our salads and sit out on a picnic table to have our breakfast. And an amazing thing happens. One after another, people come by, see the dinosaur bowl from heck, and complement it! This has happened every day now for weeks! The average is at least two complements per day. This is probably a better average than having a cute puppy with me.

So now I see my clunky chunk of a bowl in a new way. As a consciousness raising device, in this time when we are all trying to find new ways of reducing waste and living in harmony with the Earth.

 “The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.”  -David M. Ogilvy