FORAGING FRIDAY: REYNOLDS STYLE

Foraging Friday documents Kitchen Toro's exploration of New York's diverse restaurants, neighborhoods, stores and their ingredients and flavors.

It may not seem like much but I've been saving today's item for a rainy day and man, it's biblical out there, forty days and forty nights biblical. Today's foraging object is a smart, practical invention, a long overdue, slight alteration on the packaging of a classic kitchen standard: plastic wrap. Perhaps the new plastic wrap design change has made it into your home, if so, read no further and rejoice. It may very well be that this new plastic wrap has been sitting for years on supermarket shelves and that my sad little grocer has kept me in the stone age. I can almost hear you, "hey, they invented these glowing orbs called light bulbs so now you don't have to cook by firelight too!"

Here's the thing folks, the new box has a plastic zipper that Reynolds calls the "EZ Slider" that runs along the cardboard lip. When you pull out a plastic sheet to wrap something up all you have to do is slide the zipper down and it cuts away the sheet. No more tugging and pulling down on the plastic over those tiny metal teeth. No more struggling with plastic miswrapped and tangled around the cardboard core. No more stupidly getting cut on the tiny metal teeth and no more wasted pieces of crumbled up plastic folded over on itself that face it, you end up tossing in the garbage.

Good job Reynolds. The only other improvement they might have thought of is making the zipper double-edged so that you don't have to zip it back down before zip-cutting it again. Usually after zip-cutting once you leave the zipper down on that end. The next time you use it you have to pull the zipper back once and then zip it down again to cut. Right now it's like a toilet-seat, someone's inevitably going to leave it up.