NOT SO FANTASTIC

Restaurant kitchens are so dependent on plastic that a chef once punched Lennox Hastie in the stomach for misplacing a roll of cling film. “I was so upset,” says Hastie, who runs Sydney’s Firedoor. “I was pretty young and I burst into tears.” He’d simply put the cling film on the left side of the kitchen, instead of the right – and while his boss’s overreaction was out of line, it also proves that plastic wrap rules kitchens. At the first restaurant Hastie worked in – at age 15, in Sussex, England – he repeatedly reached for the plastic. He’d tend to a chicken stock or let a veal broth bubble away for nine hours, then tightly cover each one with cling film once it was done. “Which was