Basket of Disposables

Why is the Trump administration pushing restaurants to use more plastic?

- By Rebecca Leber

ANDREA REUSING, a James Beard Award– winning chef, has dozens of decisions to make about how to keep her employees and customers safe when she reopens the patio of Lantern, her popular Chapel Hill, North Carolina, restaurant. One item on her worry list: guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that encourages restaurants to use disposable dishes and cutlery to cut down on germ exposure. She cringes at the thought of all those utensils, dishes, napkins, and tablecloths flooding the landfill. Her industry has always faced a “big packaging nightmare,” Reusing says, but now, “it’s painful.”