Glass from the past
By STEVE SMITH
May 10, 2008
I’ve been reading with interest stories about problems with the plastic bottles that are being sucked on these days by everyone from four-month-old babies to 40-year-old joggers. There is concern that a chemical from these bottles that leaches into the liquid may cause harm to humans.
These plastic bottles are being banned in San Francisco and taken off the shelves at right-thinking yuppie stores all over North America. This is in spite of evidence that indicates the quantity of chemical coming from these bottles is so minuscule as to be harmless. In today’s high-speed society, facts are never allowed to stop a good panic. Anything worth reacting to is worth overreacting to.
Actually, I’m hoping that the panic-stricken parents and overzealous health fanatics will be successful in their efforts to have plastic bottles forever banned. Not because I have any great fear of leaching plastics but simply because I like glass bottles better.
As with many things for me, my feelings for glass bottles are rooted mostly in nostalgia. When I was young, pop only came in bottles and it was good. The variety of brands was enormous in those pre-conglomerate days: Nesbitt’s orange, Hires root beer, multi flavours of Canada Dry in their rather phallic bottles, Sussex flavours from New Brunswick, Wishing Well cream soda, Frostie root beer, Sun Crest orange and probably others that I can’t remember. And, of course, there was Pepsi and Coke, too, before they owned everybody else.
These bottles were sold to us in big coolers, many of them filled with cold water that we splashed on ourselves on particularly hot summer days. I remember walking home from the ball field after a dusty day of baseball and the relief we felt after pulling a dripping-wet bottle from the cooler at the nearest corner store and guzzling it down.
There was another type of pop cooler (we always said "pop" and not the more Americanized "soda") I remember, as well. This was a coin-operated affair where the bottles were suspended from their tops on a series of railings that you had to negotiate to get to the dispenser. They weren’t so bad unless the flavour you wanted was in the far corner and hemmed in by a bunch of types that you didn’t want. And there wasn’t any water to splash on yourself, either.
This was also before the era of screw tops. You had to pry open your bottle with a hand-held opener or use the one on the cooler. One year Coke had photos of NHL players on its bottle tops and I spent many moments pawing through the coolers’ bottle cap catchers trying to find Andy Bathgate or Gump Worsley.
There were many things we did in those days to enhance our pop-drinking pleasure. Before we drank our Nesbitt’s, we had to "Invert bottle to agitate the fruit pulp." With Coke and Pepsi, giving the bottle a little shake and gulping the foam couldn’t be beat. And we knew that cream soda always tasted better when it was red.
Boys being boys, many of these pop-swilling episodes were often followed by burping contests all the way down South Street in which the length and volume of gas expulsions were graded by your peers.
When cans first came out, they were a novelty. There were no pull tabs. You had to have a can opener at the ready. There wasn’t as much pop in a can or a bottle in those days, either. Ten ounces I think was the standard size. We’re up to 12 ounces (give or take a millilitre) and, of course, that feels like two ounces too much.
To me, pop tastes better out of glass bottles and they never littered the landscape like cans and plastics do now. No self-respecting kid in my day would walk past a discarded pop bottle without hauling it off to the nearest store to trade in for a couple of bubble gum.
Whenever I go to Prince Edward Island I always bring back a two-month supply of pop in glass bottles (and promptly drink it within a day and half). Squirreling things away for later consumption has never been one of my strong points. In fact, if I was a squirrel, I’d be fat for a week and dead in a month.
Nevertheless, I long admired P.E.I.’s willingness to prohibit cans and plastics. Imagine my sorrow when I found out that the Island has now fallen in line with the rest of the world and opened its shores to the dreaded plastic and aluminum. You’ll be sorry, P.E.I.!
Bottles can be reused an average of 17 to 20 times. They hold their carbonation far longer than plastics and they don’t leach into whatever liquid you’re imbibing. I was hoping Nova Scotia would, in these days when green is everybody’s favourite colour on the political landscape, follow P.E.I.’s lead and ban the offensive cans. No chance of that happening now.
I know the captains of "big pop" (the Sultans of Soda?) will say that the public has a choice now. And, it’s true, you can still buy pop in bottles, provided you’re willing to pay much more for it than you do for cans.
I can go online and order a glass bottle of Nesbitt’s for only $1.85 (plus shipping) or I can go to Sobeys and buy a six-pack of very small Coke bottles for $5. On the other hand, I can buy a case of 12 cans for $4.
Which one are most consumers going to buy? I don’t know about you, but my fondness for nostalgia only goes so far before it crashes into my wallet.