Party Plates

My friend Carol, sent me the history of the paper plate.  The surprising fact she found was that they were invented in 1904 by Martin Keyes.  He saw workers eating their lunches at a veneer plant in New York on thin waste pieces of maple veneer.   Wikipedia gives the date even earlier - German bookbinder Hermann Henschel, in Luckenwalde in 1867. The paper cup was invented as a health cup in 1908 - it was a crusade to ban publicly shared utensils in public places.  The motivation was seeing a tuberculosis patient drinking from a common dipper in a train car.  Hugh Moore's invention later became the dixie cup.  Popularization of disposable food packaging/serving items came about in the 1930s when they were used to feed remote workers and defense factory workers.  It seems that an explosion of variations developed after the war. McDonald's who made a revolutionary decision in 1948 to only serve meals in 'take-away' containers.  They caused a tectonic shift (or is it a Titanic shift?) in the restaurant business.  Fast forward to our current time and we find ourselves in the global Ocean Plastic Crisis.  Today our view of single service packaging has changed from healthy to harmful, and is presented as a world epidemic for human and other creatures' health. Consider my generation's experience of the transformation of this product: we can recall an innocent time when a paper plate meant a picnic in the park by the lake. Our pictures show the Paulownia (Empress Splendour Tree) blooming at Longwood Gardens.  This is an invasive species in North America - it is considered the fastest-growing tree int he world. Here in Niagara, it is a difficult tree to get to bloom - I know of three trees in the area.  There's a large one at Vineland Research, next to the Foreign Affair Winery and it is blooming now. There are two tiny trees in my garden.  I didn't mean to have two, I moved the tree, and this spring a second one has popped up in the original location.  They are known to survive wildfire because the roots can regenerate new, very fast-growing stems. My version is said to have white blossoms rather than the soft purple-lilac. A Paulownia's leaves and flowers are edible and used to feed livestock.  Its wood is desirable and used for jewellery boxes in Japan.  There are many positive attributes where it is native, but alas a persistent, exotic invasive in North America.