By Knuckles Runyon
Staff Writer
Nearly every foodstuff the missus buys these days comes in a resealable package. Which is great. Except one thing: Nearly none of these resealable packages work.
What in the name of holy bologna is going on here?
First since most of you do not know a world without Ziplocs, pull up a chair for a little history: It's was 70 years ago when Danish inventor Borge Madsen messed around and came up with an idea that would later save all of us (especially your humble scribe here) many, many messes. Madsen didn't know why he made the first little plastic baggy thingy. There was no intended use. There was no apparent use. That is, until a fella named Steve Ausnit came along and thought, "Hey, maybe there could be a use." (These might not have been his exact words.) Eventually, after a decade of tinkering, Ausnit created an add to the then open-ended baggy. He said, "Let's close that sucker!" (Also not what we call in my line of work a "direct quote.") Hence, according to The New York Times, he invented what we all know as the Ziploc bag.
Voila! Salami is served.
Let me tell you, when Ziplocs first made their way into grocery stores in 1968 no one knew what to do with them. Five years later, no one knew what they would do without them. As Vogue told its readers in November 1973, there is "no end of uses for those great Ziploc bags."
In the ensuing five decades, we have stored our lipstick, our Band-Aids, our school-lunch sandwiches in the airtight seal of the zipper-like mechanism that makes the Ziploc the Ziploc. This technology, if not the name, has been adopted by bag men (and women!) in way more industries than an old cuss could count. I don't buy an inordinate number of processed foods but it's nearly impossible not to come in contact with a zipped bag, circa 2024, if you are, well, an eater. Coffee. Protein. Nuts. Fiber. Don't get me started on dog treats. Even the bird seed bag! Nearly any granular or powdered or preserved or flaked food that sits on a shelf these days (and even some that require refrigeration) has a resealable top.
I say resealable top but after initial opening that really is just a theory.
At some point the trajectory of human technological advancement of resealable packaging hit a plateau. Regressed even. We have, in fact, fallen from the height of human seal-able packaging ingenuity and now live in a world in which many bags promise easy reseal but should come with a warning that you, really, should not count on that, buddy.
Sometimes the press-and-slide re-seal will hold for me once or twice – maybe three times – and then not again. Ever. Nearly always these bags fail to work 100 percent of the time. That is to say, the seal doesn't hold nearly as long as the the product you bought the bag to consume does. By definition, the contents of these packages are such that they are best not left in open air. Yet across product types, and brands, I have tried many, some more than once, always with differing levels of finger force, and the result is the same. Fail. Fail. Fail.
So ubiquitous is the "un-seal" of the modern incarnation of the mock Ziploc I am left to wonder whether the people who manufacture these bags are in cahoots with the makers of the Chip Clip. Let's face it, the heyday of the Frito-Lay bag tong is over. It was a good run! If you can reseal a bag, you don't need a clip. Ergo, I can't reseal my bags. Someone's got a scam going on here and if I don't say something who will?
