This Thanksgiving, in addition to being thankful for our health, our families and our happy homes, another valuable holiday staple also deserves a spotlight: leftovers. And, of course, the many ways we package them.
After all, there's nothing quite so satisfying as opening the refrigerator on the day after Thanksgiving to scrounge through the bags and boxes of leftovers needed to make the perfect sandwich.
I'm thinking of leftovers not just because of the holidays, but because I recently ran across some vintage Tupperware ads from the 1960s and 1970s featuring many of the items I recall from our kitchen. (And some pieces I still have after clearing out my parents' house. It's not as if a Tupperware salt and pepper shaker wears out, after all.)
While lighter, easily replaceable plastic containers may rule the leftover packaging market now, Tupperware is still the iconic brand that ruled the housewares market at the start, is still a household name, and, thanks to the brand's marketing guru Brownie Wise launched many women into sales when they hosted their first Tupperware Party, or sat and watched as their mothers did.
It's a different world now, of course. Tupperware has its products offered online as well as in parties. But you can also use the Internet for a blast of nostalgia. In addition to those vintage ads, just check out the 1959 short film “The Wonderful World of Tupperware,” which takes you on every step in a bowl's process of going from raw materials to finished products, with stops at an ethane plant, design studios, mold making shops, Tupperware's North Smithfield, R.I., molding shop — which the film notes was then the world's largest injection molding plant — and finally to a Florida meeting of Tupperware distributors.
(Seriously, just check out the hand etching of a stainless steel mold with the Tupperware logo and trademark. Those are days that are long gone. Of course, so are the days when no one wore safety glasses in a plant, so I guess it's a “win” for modern manufacturing in the long run.)