Food packaging: an embarrassment to modernity

I promised mundane opinions, so here is one: I don’t understand what the hell is going on with food packaging being so hard to open sometimes. Don’t we go to a whole lot of effort to live in modernity and have civilization? If I was the kind of person who wanted getting 100 calories to require making my hands bleed, I would live in the middle ages in a jungle. It’s obviously not that we have as a society failed to invent openable packages, because some brands have them. Is there just no competition on this? Are consumers just like ‘hmm, on the one hand organic and nice purple bag, on the other hand, will require borrowing saw from neighbor…sounds good’? For my own part, I can’t remember all the different products well enough to avoid some of them, so maybe that’s how it all fails. But if the markets as a whole can’t sort out which is better out of 500g of crumbled feta, and 500g of crumbled feta plus two minutes of frustration and suffering, what can they figure out?

It would be fine if the companies who are going to put their food in absurdly difficult to open containers would just add a helpful label on the outside. Maybe ‘97% openable without swearing’ if they want to avoid being negative. But I suppose it is up to the brands with positive qualities to advertise them, and ‘openable’ doesn’t sound very impressive, while ‘openable with 90% less despair than other brands’ doesn’t sound good.

One time I wrote to a yogurt company about their recent move to packaging that more or less couldn’t be opened in a natural way, and I think they said they messed up the lid making process somehow, maybe by replacing the usual substance with a new one, and would try to do better. So maybe that’s what is usually going on. 

But hasn’t somebody made lids out of this stuff before? Do so many plastic tubs need to be forging new frontiers of plastic-tubness? Are these just the prices we pay for moving into an even better new modernity where it is not only possible to go about everyday life without blood loss, but also where opening a packet of cheese is actively blissful?

I had a good photo of a particularly bloody Jello packet accident, but you are in luck, I can’t easily find it.