Should we regulate soy-sauce packet distribution? That's what a Colorado legislator wants to do: ban takeout places from dumping sauce packets and plastic utensils in your bag, unless you ask. She shared a picture of a drawer on Twitter, filled with packets, just to show how this stuff clutters up our kitchens.

Everyone has a sauce-packet drawer, right? It is usually not the junk drawer. The latter is where you ditch the rubber bands, dead pens, paperclips, Post-it note pads with six sheets left, 3-cent stamps, 27 tubes of lip balm, 14 screws you might need someday, a push-pin with the point up so you jab yourself looking for a battery, a packet of spare bulbs for the holiday lights (including fuses the size of an ant thorax) and so on.

The sauce-packet drawer is different. It's often the place for cutlery or food-prep items. If you put sauce packets in the junk drawer, you are a savage.

I checked my drawer to see if we were overburdened with sauce pouches, and I was not surprised: half a dozen Taco Bell packets that probably have fermented into some hallucinogenic substance by now. Four hot mustards, with that special little tang you suspect actually is gasoline. Two packets of duck sauce, or "Daffy Juice," as we never call it. Soy sauce? None.

That's because we use them up.

There are two schools of thought on these packets.

1. The wise person who carefully manages their condiment stocks and thinks of future soy-involved situations will use the opened bottle of soy sauce first and save the packets for emergencies. (Note: there are never any soy emergencies, but there could be.)

2. The lazy person will use the soy sauce packets that come with the meal because they're right there, on the table, and the house soy sauce is in the cupboard somewhere. What's that? You want me to go all the way across the room and get it?

What if the bottle isn't open? You know how they have that foil seal with the tiny little tabs glued with industrial death-grip epoxy, and you can't get it off with your fingernail, and so you try biting it, but that doesn't work, so you get out a knife, and it slips and goes through your finger? Is that what you want? Because someone has to clean up the blood after we get back from the ER. So I say we use the packets that are here and avoid costly medical bills.

I straddle the two extremes. I want to save the soy sauce packet, because it could come in handy if there's a Depression. On the other hand, this might be the first time in my life I'm able to open the packet with some degree of precision and add a few drops to the rice instead of dumping out the entire contents. I understand that's considered incredibly gauche and boorish. The whole soy-sauce thing might be an expression of contempt by Asian restaurants, like a French chef sending out a gravy bowl of ketchup to the loud-shirted Americans in the dining room.

We'll probably end up with a small fee for plastic packets, just as there's a fee for plastic bags. Everyone will grumble, pay it and continue to squirrel away excess soy rations in the drawer.

Which, in our case, also has the excess plastic bags. They might come in handy sometime. Are we having a Depression yet? No? Well, fingers crossed.

James Lileks is a Star Tribune columnist. 

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