I don’t buy napkins.

In fact, to the best of my knowledge, I have never bought them (I am quite certain that my wife has in fact purchased them for our household at some point, but for our purposes here, she doesn’t count; my blog, my experiences).

Don’t get me wrong — it’s not that I don’t use napkins. Quite the contrary, I tend to be sort of a messy eater, and in fact I have a personal rule of thumb never to wear a white shirt when work or anything else requires me to go to any kind of function that includes dining. If I am going to spill coffee, ketchup, etc. on myself, I’d rather be wearing dark-colored clothing.

So, as you can see, I have frequent need of napkins, and thus am I very thankful to Subway, Hasty Freez, Ciddici’s, Pepper Tree, Taco Time, McDonald’s and Togo’s — the Super Seven that take care of a large part of my nutritional needs — for always giving me so many napkins with my order, way more than I need for any given meal.

At work, I store the extras under this funky little crock that serves as the outer vault for the savings and loan that Kim Jackson, Mike Henneke and I operate. At home, they go, amazingly enough, into a napkin holder, right next to the microwave that I can never remember how to operate, because it’s exactly backward from how you operate the one in our lunchroom at the DH (make me king, and we standardize all microwave controls, but that’s a story for another time; we also send soccer to the boneyard, but that too is a tale for a later date).

Anyway, I feel quite proud of myself, thrifty as well as environmental, for making such good use of these eateries’ single-ply largesse. And, I might point out, I also reuse the plastic bags Subway packs my to-go orders in; when I pack a sandwich for work, I use a Subway bag, or a bread bag, or a bagel bag, and I can use the same one for a couple weeks.

Who’d have thunk a simple thing like an eating regimen could be so green.