In the 1950’s one of the laundry detergent companies had a promotion in which they included a piece of dinnerware in the box.\u00a0 By buying enough, you could collect a full set of plates, bowls and cups.\u00a0\u00a0 We were one of many families who eagerly collected the set.\u00a0 Other detergent brands packed glasses and towels in their detergent boxes.<\/p>\n
The dishes were not wrapped in any way; they were just immersed in the detergent inside the box.\u00a0 I became convinced (I was maybe 6 years old) that having spent so much time in a detergent box, the dishes had absorbed some of the chemicals that could never be washed off, therefore rendering these plate permanently poisonous.<\/p>\n
I insisted that I would not eat from any of this contaminated dinnerware.\u00a0 My mother indulged me and my place setting always included only our older, less colorful plates.<\/p>\n
My teenage sister Sheila wasn’t as nice.\u00a0 More than once, she served me food in a poison dish.\u00a0 For example, by filling a bowl of ice cream just right, she would hide the floral pattern.\u00a0 I would eat the ice cream until the pattern was exposed and be thrown into a panic, convinced that I had just swallowed laundry detergent.<\/p>\n
My sister thought this was great sport and spent considerable effort to trick me into eating poison food.\u00a0 She even managed to get the last laugh decades later by sending me a poison bowl she had found at a garage sale as my birthday present.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This was the 1950’s when we were kids. Eating Tide Pods wasn’t the first detergent-eating scare. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[104],"tags":[212,213,211],"class_list":["post-1576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-old-stories","tag-detergent","tag-dinnerware-in-laundry-detergent","tag-duz"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pauldearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pauldearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pauldearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pauldearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pauldearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1576"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pauldearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1577,"href":"https:\/\/pauldearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576\/revisions\/1577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pauldearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pauldearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pauldearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}