Brown paper bags

[Kinch]

Wanna know why they're dyed brown?

[Kinch]

This is gonna blow your mind.

[azmuse]

a rare brown genus of polar bear supplies some of its stem cells; then its melanocytes are duplicated a trillion times over for the little ones, to protect their pbj sandwiches and smushed bananas. it is a horribly long, complicated process because it takes so many of these "paper" thin (hence the name) layers to create a bag, therefore if yoghurt or the like spills, it gets all over their books and homework. which is a wonderful excuse for teacher every day of the week!

what were you going to say?

[IWilKikU]

yeah. Duh Kinch!!! I thought everyone knew that!

[piquant]

Melanocytes...really. :)

[piquant]

I always thought it was just cheaper not to bleach the paper.

[Kinch]

No, no . . . it's even better than that, az. Listen: one-hundred years ago, New York City bought 600,000 mummies from Egypt, they ground them up and used the pulp to make twelve-million paper grocery bags, which were brown because of the aged flesh matter they contained. Nowadays, grocery stores dye their bags brown because it has been that way for a hundred years and has become a normative part of our lives. But Egpyt wouldn't do that today. Not in a million years. But it wasn't until the 1930s that Egpyt started to realize that perhaps preserving the posterity of their ancestors might be worth considering. That maybe we'd learn something about ourselves.

I love this world.

[den]

Actually they used ground up mummy for cosmetics, health supplements and paint pigment.

[Kinch]

Or both.

[Kinch]

den, I think your nipple is showing in that avatar.

[den]

Gawd you're so obvious :P

[IWilKikU]

I think its hot!