Land of the Square Blue Tub
In praise of Aotearoa's favorite container, from ice cream to cradle to grave
Once a year the school asks our kids to bring in a stash of emergency food. This is earthquake country—woke to a 3.7 love tap the other night, in fact—and the idea is that if/when the Big One separates families past dinnertime, the tamariki will have something to eat. Our first year here we delivered ours in a Ziploc bag. By the next, we’d learned the wonders of the Tip Top tub.
It’s a two-liter ice cream bucket, or begins life that way. Tip Top Ice Cream is one of those adored Kiwiana brands snapped up by a lumbering international beast (Nestle, in 2019). The ice cream is fine but the containers are excellent. They’re plastic half-cubes in the cheery, industrial blue of a playground slide. The corners are rounded. There are no handles to break. Their lids snap tight and they stack like bricks in a pantry or garage. And they’re everywhere, like some shadow national currency.
So I had a vision: a portrait of NZ via a peek inside every Tip Tob tub in the country, and all of their contents, all in a single moment. Like one of those old Day in the Life coffee-table books? Millions out there, gotta be. Kiwis eat a ton of ice cream and reuse stuff like mad. More tubs than people here, for sure. More tubs than sheep?
I chatted up the school office. I asked my friends. And then I begged the kindness of strangers in the national confession booth at Reddit’s r/newzealand: What are the Tip Top tubs in your life holding right now?
Frozen soup, the answer came. Lakes of it, apparently, and mostly pumpkin. “Epic year for pumpkins,” one redditor noted.
Frozen chicken stock, too. Frozen casserole, kimchi, chili, dhal, sorbet, jam. “Edibles, labeled soup.” Stewed apple and blanched silver beet. Feijoas, peaches, plums, last summer’s berries. In the pantry: kumara, potatoes, onions. All things baking. Leftovers. Compost and coffee grounds. “Elderly scones.” Cat food, dog food, kid snacks, aquarium parts. Fishing lures. Seed packets and seedlings. “Sometimes a tall indoor potted plant when I’m lazy.”
The chat was rolling. Dishwasher pods. Sandpaper, new and used. Spare bulbs for a ’39 Chevy and unlabeled bolts off a Mazda RX-7. Rugby trading cards, Dragonball Z cards, Jenga, jigsaw puzzles. Playdoh, Potter’s clay, feathers, and yarn sorted by color. Breast pumps and guitar cables. Clothing pegs and Christmas ornaments. Kids toys and childhood toys. Ruined brushes congealed in turpentine. “Failed expectations and shattered dreams.” Raffle tickets. Dead batteries. Dryer lint.
A Tip Top tub is right now catching the drip under a leaky toilet tank. One scoops alpaca feed, another scoops out frogs stuck in a water trough. “I’ve been in more than one commercial blueberry operation where they are the basic unit for moving blueberries around.” Water bowls for pets. Carsick buckets for kids. Filled with water and frozen they’ll keep your chilly bin cold all weekend. They’ll deliver cookies to the party and never need to come home. “Anytime I ever bought an ounce of weed it came in a TipTop container.”
The dealers, they know. The tubs—ubiquitous, all but free, easy to clean, and hard to break—carry all things too profane to mix with the rest of life: dead food for the worm bin, a sick pet’s used needles, vomit to rinse out the minute you get home.
The profane, of course, is just another flavor of the sacred.
“Okay don’t judge…but we had to put down our beloved pet rat recently,” one redditor wrote. “He is in two freezer bags, in an ice cream container in the freezer.” A proper burial is planned. They’re renters. It’s tricky.
“My mother’s ashes,” wrote another.
“Grandma’s ashes,” wrote another.
Happens enough to be a morning radio spot just this week.
Americans, y’all recognize the joke? The Big Lebowski (1998) ends with remains in a Folger’s coffee can, once our own country’s classic post-consumer vessel. But that’s American history now. Folger’s switched to an indifferent plastic jug a few years after the film, and since then wave upon wave of new packaging (Keurig cups! Olive oil in squirt bottles!) has replaced workaday icons with viral trends. We like our carry-alls shiny, new, and tactical grade. We’ve got an entire Container Store.
Not so in NZ. There’s still plenty of dumb consumer trash here; just hit the Warehouse or Briscoes on their zombie weekend sale. But in broad strokes I can say the volume of crap is less, the costs generally higher, and the quality often lower. Tip Top tubs fill a niche this remote island market can’t otherwise serve. One redditor reckoned the blue tubs resisted NZ’s wicked UV rays here better than storage containers you can actually buy.
Which is only to say the tubs are made of the same deathless plastic as everything else. A blogpost on ice cream tubs is no longer the simple pleasure it might’ve been. In our NZ portrait we’d have to include the Boysenberry Ripple lid even now surfing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Microflecks of Tip Top blue run in my veins and yours. We live in our plastic, and our plastic lives, well, everywhere, in tiny scraps uncountable as the stars.
So it’s fitting—even weirdly holy—that our remains might lie in state in a material whose damnable strength carried us through all our days, and will mark our presence on Earth longer than anything else we leave behind.
But enough of death. Back to beginnings. Here’s the survey answer this gringo never saw coming:
“x2 (frozen) placentas.”
Awaiting burial, that is. It’s a Māori tradition meant to bond the child to their homeland and honor Papatūānuku, the earth mother; in Te Reo Māori whenua (the wh is pronounced as a ph) means both land and placenta. There are similar rituals elsewhere, even in the US, where the Navajo and native Hawaiians do the same. Here in NZ the ritual has caught on among many non-Māori; there’s an annual mass burial in Nelson each year open to all.
Looks nice! I mean, if we lived in Nelson, and thought we’d stay? And if we’d saved our kids’ placentas. Never thought to. We were moving too much. Must be all kinds of rules about taking them on international flights. I expect they’re ashes in landfills now. Buried, as it were. Outside a city we once lived.
Back in the Reddit the placenta sidebar rolled on. Parents compared how long they’ve waited (“It’s been 12+ years… 😂”) and why. You’ve got to pick a spot, or plan a trip to the family’s chosen site. Maybe you’re renting, and holding out for land you own? And no parent of toddlers hits the weekend saying I just want to dig a hole.
And so the whenua waits, a lump of would-be land sleeping in its tub between the mince and ice blocks. The to-do list never ends. The years go by like sweet little days.
“My sister still has the one from her firstborn in the freezer,” one redditor wrote. “She’s a grandmother now.”
A full freezer, a full life! And I wonder when, and how—settling over generations, in the turn of one hard or happy year, or all at once on a quiet winter midnight, when the grandmother woke to a local tremor passing through the house like a train in the dark—did the tub become a home?
New Zealand is lucky to be observed like this.