Paper and plastic dishes, alongside ancillary products like disposable cutlery and drinking straws, are characteristically modern product in that they have functionalities once achievable only with expensive materials. The eating utensils, dishes, and drinking containers we routinely use are made of metals, ceramics, thick plastics, and artfully shaped wood. Thus they are fairly expensive. Before the twentieth century only such reusable dishware was available. Too valuable to throw away they imposed, and still impose, the labor of cleaning them after use. With the emergence of disposable tableware early in the twentieth century a new era dawned and, in effect, made casual eating and drinking, often on the run, routine. Tableware cheap enough emerged so that a host can spend as little as 30 to 60 cents per guest for plate, cup, and cutlery. The lower end represents paper, the higher end represents implements made of plastics. These objects can go directly into a lined garbage can after the casual meal is eaten. Very little clean-up is necessary. The cost of tableware is a small fraction of the host's expenditures on food and drink.

    The major materials used to make disposable tableware—paper and plastic—also revolutionized packaging so that, in the food distribution sector, the package in which the food is delivered may also be the tableware in which it is eaten. Two examples are food sold in serving cups, such as puddings or yogurts, and meals intended to be microwaved in their own trays. One of the largest users of disposable tableware is the fast food industry. One of its most common so-called dishes is the foam plastic container which acts as the delivery packing as well as the dispensing plate.

Plastics are one of the most versatile materials ever developed by humanity. The material is with us everywhere in solid objects such as films and fabrics, as coatings, and as foams. Within the foodservice category, solid plastics have become the material of choice for permanent tableware and are also the dominant materials in disposable cups. So many dishes are made of plastics that measuring the role of plastics in the disposables category is difficult. Lines of demarcation between permanent and throwaway products are also difficult to draw.

    This essay deals narrowly with disposables used in serving food and drink, thus with plates and drinking cups, cup-shaped containers intended to be used in eating the products they contain, larger disposable platters and bowls, foam trays used in fast foodservice, trays which are the structural support of ready-to-eat meals, straws used for drinking, and throw-away-cutlery. Kitchenware is excluded although disposables play a role in cooking as well. So are plastic dishes intended to be washed after meals and used many times.