Even if mum’s no longer around, and even though the plastic containers we use to store our homemade lunches for the office or keep leftovers in the fridge are bought from supermarkets, we’ll still call them Tupperware.
For a long time to come, until every memory fades, they’ll remain the “little Tupperware boxes” that mum used to prepare for us.
My generation will remember the women of the 1970s and beyond, cleaning their homes, baking cakes, putting on their best clothes to welcome friends, neighbours, and fellow villagers – all gathering to delve into the secrets of a plastic that came in many forms and uses. A plastic that took on mythical proportions.
It was an era when women, especially in villages, had limited access to consumer goods and social activities.
The Tupperware demonstrations were a social event, thoroughly commercial in nature, yet the women of the time experienced it as participation in a changing world.
Beyond the practicality of plastic containers lay the myth surrounding them. It was successful marketing before marketing was even taught as a science in universities.
A chemist named Earl Tupper created and marketed, shortly after the Second World War, a plastic container with an airtight seal that helped preserve and transport food. The breakthrough came when Brownie Wise, a housewife, took charge of door-to-door sales.
After recruiting several women to promote the products at home demonstrations over coffee and cake, she convinced Mr Tupper to withdraw them from shops. The only way to acquire them was through “Tupperware parties”, which became a defining feature of the era.
Though this phenomenon started in America, it gradually crossed borders, reaching about 100 countries, including Cyprus in its early years of independence. It began there in 1966, and today the circle closes.
The company has announced that today is the final day for accepting orders. For some, these items might become collectors’ pieces.
For others, the pastel colours of Tupperware will evoke memories of different times: when jelly (that singular dessert of an era, now served only in hospitals) could be shaped into forms; when housewives could mould rice pilaf into shapes; when metal lunch boxes were replaced by colourful plastic containers, just as glass and ceramic water jugs gave way to plastic ones…
When even a simple piece of plastic could create the impression that the world was changing.