Airport skinflints inspire Ziploc-led survival strategy

Recession survivors will need to keep a resealable sandwich bag about their person at all times, writes ORNA MULCAHY.

LIFE HAS taken a turn for the tedious. According to Economist.com, the online version of the business bible, "ostentatious parsimony is the new conspicuous spending", which we all know to be true but, frankly, there's not a lot of fun in it. Fashionable and all as it is to buy meal deals at MS and carry a card that gets you the 10th latte free, secretly, one longs for a bit of the old excess – the reckless breaking of €50 notes, the buying of two pairs of shoes at a time, the supermarket shop that doesn't involve a lot of dreary brands on half price offers, or even chatting to someone socially without getting a rundown on their debt levels, Stubbs Gazette -style.

Yesterday, hitting a new low, I found myself having pasta envy. A friend was eating some elegant pasta squiggles she’d brought from home in a snazzy little lunchbox and, honestly it was nearly as bad as the time she got a Cartier watch. Where had she found them? Some expensive deli in Ranelagh, it turns out, while I’m stuck with a year’s supply of Lidl’s monstrous rubbery pasta tubes that are so much cheaper but horrible to eat. Experts will tell you that there are distinct stages to a downturn – denial, fear, false hope, despair and finally capitulation. To that can I add one more: boredom. The initial horrors of the recession, the thrilling speed of our descent into basket case territory, has given way to a grudging acceptance that we have to spend less and save more, not just for now but possibly for years and years to come.

I see a future in which one has to keep a Glad sandwich bag about one’s person at all times. Yes, those handy, small resealable bags are having their 15 minutes of fame now that the skinflints at Dublin airport plan to charge €1 for two bags of the kind needed to go through security. As usual the customer is being shamelessly ripped off here, with the actual cost of the bags about 2 cent each according the Dublin Airport Authority’s own calculations as to how much they’ve spent on them over the last 2½ years.

A Kerry caller to one of the chat shows yesterday called it a great opportunity to do it a bit of business, with people being able to flog the bags outside the airport for less, while another caller complained that the freezer bag she tried to use going through a UK airport was rejected on the basis that the camera could not see through the opaque strip for writing “Pork Chops, May 09” on.

It’s likely that the snobbish element will trade up to Ziploc bags, the bigger brand American plastic bag that comes in many different sizes and dimensions and encourages all kinds of obsessive compulsive behaviour. Of course the bags are useful for storing lots of things – American dimes and nickels from that last shopping trip (all that’s usually left over), the detergent for washing your own undies in hotel rooms and so forth. But after a while you can become addicted to plastic bagging, using Ziplocs to say – envelope the TV remote in case of germs; packing and labelling childrens’ clothes, outfit by outfit, for holidays so they are always perfectly co-ordinated; even making an omelette by breaking a couple of eggs into a Ziploc, shaking it around and heating it up in a boiling kettle. Yes, there are people out there who do these things.

Diehard organisers will have a stock of Hefties, gallon-size bags, again from America, that you could fit a weekend wardrobe into if you scrunch everything up enough. Then, if you vacuum out the excess air and fold it into your handbag, you won’t have to give Michael O’Leary a penny more of your hard earned. On the down side, you’ll never get the creases out.

Then there is the obvious use for small, sealable bags and that is to freeze things in. Home freezing is making a comeback, according to foodie blogs that are alive with tips like this one: “You can freeze the contents of a tin of tomato puree by opening it at both ends, pushing out the puree, cutting it into discs, freezing the discs on a cookie tray and then storing them in little bags for use as you need them”. Alternatively, leave in the freezer for two years, scratch your head as to why you’ve saved half pint of blood, and then chuck in the bin to make way for that bag of stock turned into ice cubes.

Years ago in another life, I had the job of transcribing the ramblings of the model Marie Helvin for a book. Her top freezer tip for keeping slim was to eat directly from the freezer, bypassing the defrost routine. Gnaw on a frozen Mars bar and you soon give up, she said with tinkly laugh. Well, if we can’t be rich, it’s worth trying to be thin – why not give it a try?