A historian unpacks the origins of our plastic addiction

Plastic became the basis for a new relationship to the material world: it required consumers to buy things rather than make them, to throw things out rather than fix them. The microwave oven had not yet taken off and frozen foods were still in foil, ketchup still came in glass bottles, and the shift from paper to plastic at the grocery store was more than a decade away. None of us live in exactly the future that the Monsanto House designers envisioned, but plastic has indeed become the defining material of our time.

Source: www.theguardian.com