Then & Now | When packaging in Hong Kong meant sago or rattan, before plastic bag nightmare began

Long before the era of plastic packaging that, when carelessly discarded, fouls our seas, reusable sago and rattan, or old newspapers, were used to wrap fragile goods and food items

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A Cheung Chau fisherman with marine littler. Pictures: SCMP

Jason Wordie

Published: 8:17am, 26 May 2017Updated: 11:04pm, 12 Jun 2017

Affluent Hong Kong shoppers prepared to pay HK$168 for a single, air-freighted Japanese strawberry swaddled in masses of plastic wrapping – and the supermarkets that profitably cater to these idiotic consumerist whims – recently made headlines. Unsurprisingly, these cute edible treats hit the shops just before the St Valentine’s Day gift-buying binge. Public criticism mostly focused on packaging that would go straight into already overflowing landfills once the grotesquely overpriced strawberry had been unwrapped and eaten.

Sago - good for packaging, and you can turn it into food afterwards. Photo: Alamy

Home-grown consumerist nonsense aside, reliable packing material has been an essential component of any well-developed market economy for millennia; without dependable packaging, spoilage of fresh products, and damage of fragile items, would make many traded goods uneconomical. For centuries, packing materials were imported into China to enable high-value items to be exported with minimal breakages.

Probably the most surprising packing material used in earlier times, when seen from today’s perspective, was sago. This tropical starch remains best known – especially among those unfortunates who don’t know how to cook it properly – as a glutinous, milky-grey, horror-story pudding served up in the refectories of second-rate British boarding schools. But from the early 18th century onwards, sago (and its counterpart, pearl tapioca) was imported into China from Southeast Asia in massive quantities as packing for porcelain.

Crockery that was wrapped in straw paper, surrounded by sago, and packed tight in wooden kegs, could survive rough transit by sea and land to markets in Europe and North America. Sago was, in essence, the polystyrene packaging of its day. But unlike polystyrene, sago didn’t end up poisoning landfills and seas; as an edible starch, it was sold off cheaply at the final destination, evolving into an inexpensive, European-style milk-pudding base or soup thickener.