From what I recall the math on shopping bags isn’t quite that bad—well, cloth tote bags are awful and don’t come even close to breaking even (that might be where the “few thousand times” figure comes from), but the math can work out on certain kinds of more durable plastic bags. However, plastic grocery bags use barely any plastic to begin with whereas most takeout containers use a substantial amount, so I think the break-even point is more favorable in this application. But even so, it’ll only work if you have strong incentive programs in place to make sure containers get returned (e.g. large deposits), a wide network of drop-off points (to prevent extra trips from being taken, especially car trips), and a unified system (to prevent inefficient fragmentation of said drop-off/sanitization system). It’s not an automatic win, but I think it’s worth studying the feasibility of such a system.

That said, this is all in service of preserving treats with the minimum amount of inconvenience to consumers. In a degrowth scenario, it’d probably be a lot better if we had more communal cafeterias and stuff like that, since it’s more energy efficient to ship, store, and cook large batches of food and you don’t need a complex city-wide logistical system to wash dishes. In that pie-in-the-sky scenario we’d also actually take infection control seriously and have stringent filtration and ventilation systems, Far-UVC, contact tracing, masking on public transit, and so on. Because no fucking way are you gonna catch me dead sitting down to eat in a restaurant in this day and age

…just spaced out a bit for a second there thinking about how much nicer the hellish nondescript suburbs would be if they replaced the stroads with streetcars and tree-lined bicycle and pedestrian lanes