Dingle Balls and Food Baggies

What on earth, you may be asking – do these two things have in common?

Well my friends, the answer is - the kitchen shears.  Hmm, the kitchen Shears?  Yes indeed.

The ones above are ours – a nice pair, Fiskars, we have had them for many, many years.  They’ve been well used, banged around and super glued, yet they still prevail, like they know they have a mission – to be THE kitchen shears for the lifetime of the family and dangit – they are going do just that!

Again you ask – dingle balls and food baggies? And again I say yes and anything else that is in the kitchen that needs to be snipped open or snipped off.  Are you getting the picture?  If your house is like ours the back door leads right into the kitchen.  And yes, it’s a very busy place that kitchen.

So when you have a bag of say frozen peas that needs to be open, you reach into the junk drawer for the kitchen shears, likewise for a package of bacon, popsicles, boil in bag rice, frozen pastry bags, frosting packs, flea and tick medicine, super glue tips, batteries, animal treat bags, mail in bubble wrap envelopes AND when the doggie comes in with something stuck to her fur – for example dingle balls – you grab the kitchen shears before that stuff gets tracked all over the house! 

Has no one ever considered that the same blade that is used to remove the dingle balls, or tar or whatever other sticky and nasty thing that comes in from the outdoors (and yes the poisonous flea medicine in the little tubes) is the same blade that touches the bag of already cooked sticky boil in bag rice or the squeeze up popsicle you are about to feed your kid…. Yeah – something to think about.

How come we do not have separate scissors for things that occur in the kitchen, i.e. one for foodie items and one for EVERYTHING else?  Why?   

Hasn’t it just always been this way?  Can’t you picture the black or red handled scissors from your youth that were in your parents, aunts or grandmas kitchen?  Isn’t this where you learned of the vital importance of kitchen shears and carried it over to your own house? Aren’t they convenient and aren’t you proud every time you can find them?  

And why it is that no one has ever considered the nastiness of it all?

By the way, yes, I do have separate shears for cutting vegetables like scallions and herbs, but those live in the knife block and they really are an entirely different kind of scissor.   

So kids, I propose a movement, that we have TWO, yes TWO pairs of kitchen shears- one for food like items and one for everything else. 

I know, this is a big shift from the norm and it will require that they live in different areas or there will be no differentiation between the two.  So head the store for a spiffy new pair and then pick out a second drawer for them to live in and give your new scissors a hearty welcome!  

Then watch your husband and kids use them to cut the gum out of Fido’s paw – yeah, guess it won’t work – maybe if we just toss them into the dishwasher every once in a while we’ll feel better about it all?  Sorry I brought it up….