Pesah report - disposables

Because we keep Pesah enough to switch out our dishes, and because we don't have china or enough money to invest in a very good second set of kitchenware for a 7-day holiday, every year we are faced with the dilemma of whether to buy plastic or paper goods to get through the holiday or whether to spend the money (and the effort) to buy something more substantial and longlasting and green.

We have leftover ceramic plates from a previous set that we use for milk, but our seders are usually meat, and for those we have fairly durable plastic bowls and plates that we've been using for a couple of years. Not the highest quality place settings in the world, but it works okay.

We realized in preparation for the holiday this year that we didn't have hot drink cups or salad plates. My family, which was with us this year, also has a custom of serving eggs in salt water as an appetizer before the meal; this is not DW's custom and she has been trying to get us to stop it for years, but it's a custom that seems to be held pretty dear. This necessitated another bowl, so we would either have had to wash out the soup bowls in between courses or buy some more bowls.

My parents came home from the shopping excursion with plastic salad plates and styrofoam bowls and hot cups. Styrofoam was more than DW could stand so I was sent back to the Dillons to look for something else. I don't know if there's really any appreciable difference in greenitude between styrofoam and any other kind of disposable kitchenware but in any case there weren't any disposable hot cups that weren't styrofoam so I ended up buying 8 glass coffee cups (usable with both milk and meat). After another effort by DW to get the eggs served on a plate with the fish, we kept the styrofoam bowls and plastic salad plates. (This latter we'll reuse all week at least.)

The glasses cost $2 each, and that's our investment in Pesah kitchenware for this year. Next year perhaps we'll buy some more ceramics to replace the plastic we've been using. At least some more bowls. And anyway, if we're with DW's family next year, they don't serve eggs that way so they don't need 2 bowls.