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Sep. 2nd, 2014 05:16 pmHere's an esoteric historical question for you: what did WWII-era soldiers in the field do with the packaging from c-rations and other trash of that nature? My intuitive feeling is that they'd just drop it wherever they happened to be, because a) carrying useless weight is highly impractical when you're tired and underfed and people are trying to kill you, and b) our modern-day cultural value regarding "littering is bad" had yet to take hold, and wasn't really something most people thought about, so just chucking a can into the bushes was a perfectly valid way of dealing with it, if you didn't have an immediate use for it.
(For that matter, my general experience has been that there's still sort of an urban/rural divide about it, with a lot of rural/semi-rural people not really thinking too much about dealing with trash in the old-fashioned "just drop it wherever" style. We're always having to clean up after hunters and picnickers in the gravel pit. Read a book not too long ago on Montana ranching that describes how one ranch where the writer worked as a ranch hand would just bulldoze the bodies of dead cows off a handy nearby cliff. Out of sight, out of mind!)
It's a strangely difficult detail to find via googling, though.
(For that matter, my general experience has been that there's still sort of an urban/rural divide about it, with a lot of rural/semi-rural people not really thinking too much about dealing with trash in the old-fashioned "just drop it wherever" style. We're always having to clean up after hunters and picnickers in the gravel pit. Read a book not too long ago on Montana ranching that describes how one ranch where the writer worked as a ranch hand would just bulldoze the bodies of dead cows off a handy nearby cliff. Out of sight, out of mind!)
It's a strangely difficult detail to find via googling, though.
