Rathje found that most households in Mexico City made their own orange juice, rather than buy the pre-packaged processed variety. The result is that the average Mexican City household threw out 10.5 pounds of orange peel each week compared with 2 ounces of cardboard or aluminium from fruit concentrate containers that the typical American household threw out. Moreover, the peel from the oranges used to process the concentrate were converted into other products. And there s more to come. The Mexican City household required 25 per cent more oranges to produce the same amount of orange juice that the American household consumed.
Milk is another example of processing and packaging.
Well into the nineteenth century milk was delivered in churns on horse-drawn carts along streets splattered with horse manure and buzzing with flies in the summer. It was in these conditions people had their milk poured into open jugs. But then some capitalists had the greedy anti-social idea of processing and bottling the milk in dairies and then delivering it to consumers. What a wasteful process all that glass and all those bottles. To talk of the packaging and processing of food if it were part of some wasteful capitalist process, as Vandana Shiva does, is to reveal an appalling ignorance of the social and economic forces at work.