Like I mentioned on the blog before, one day I woke up and decided to go zero-waste. I prided myself on the fact that our house generated such little trash… until I looked at the recycle bin. The recycle bin overflows every single week.

I’m avoiding too many statistics as to not depress myself further, but less than 14% of plastic packaging gets recycled (per the Natural Resources Defense Council), something like 30% of recycling actually gets recycled, and 45% of what’s in American landfills is food and food packaging (per the EPA). This problem has been exacerbated by the fact that China no longer takes our recycling. I believe they used to buy, process, and use it, but due to capacity and the tariff wars, that has ceased. Some American cities were considering stopping recycling services, because without China buying our recyclables, it cost too much to recycle.

My heart is palpitating now.

Naturally, this led me to reevaluate what I was buying that was producing so much packaging waste.

And let’s stick to packaging for now; food waste is a beast for another time. You could argue that packaging reduces food waste, which is very legitimate. Do the resources that go into food production exceed the resources used to make and dispose of packaging? Would food waste increase if we decreased our use of packaging? Ugh, guys, one thing at a time.

Here is the absolute kicker about packaging, a fact I learned, laughed at, and had to research. Food packaging essentially allowed women to get out of the kitchen and into the workplace.

The irony.

It makes perfect sense, though. To oversimplify, men went to work to pay for the food or farmed it themselves; women prepared it. Regardless of the source of the food, it needed to be prepared, which takes time and effort. Is it the chicken or the egg: by reducing the time and effort of food preparation, women were available to work, or because women entered the workforce, they no longer had time to prepare food the way they used to? There’s probably a sociological answer to this, but that’s beside the point.

We now live in a society that depends heavily on packaged food and beverages:

• Granola bars
• Bottled water
• Produce: berries come in plastic quarts, lettuce in sealed bags
• Individual, serving-sized snack packs
• Entire meals frozen in plastic

And it produces so. much. waste.

We evolved from hunting and growing food ourselves to buy everything pre-packaged. I’m not here to criticize, but is there a balance we can find?

Here are some steps I’ve taken to reduce the packaging I bring into my home.

• Find a bulk grocery store: I shop at Sprout’s, but Whole Foods has bulk bins too. Pack up a bunch of containers, take them to the store, get them weighed, label them with their weight, and fill ’em up. I buy and fill my own jars of the following from bulk bins:
  • Oats
  • Raisins and dried fruit
  • Nuts, trail mixes, chocolate-covered nuts, candy
  • Peanut butter and other nut butters
  • Coffee
  • Flour (white, wheat, gluten-free, almond, etc.), salt (including Himalayan), sugar, other baking ingredients
  • Granola and cereal
  • Beans
• Buy jars and containers from the thrift store: Glass is easily cleaned if secondhand food storage freaks you out. If the heat in your dishwasher can kill germs from raw chicken, it can clean a thrift store mason jar. Also, you can buy brand new packs of Ball lids for mason jars in all sizes online. Super easy, super cheap.
• Prepare recipes in bulk and freeze until use: I go through a lot of pasta sauce and a lot of salsa. I try to prepare three or four jars of a each at a time and freeze them for future use. That saves me from buying jars of each; however, sauce and salsa jars are perfect for reuse if you’re in the market! Granola and granola bars are also easy to make at home.

I’m still trying to find pasta noodles in bulk; even at Costco, “bulk” packs are just boxes of normal sized boxes. I’m also in the market for a Soda Stream, as I live for seltzer but hate the plastic bottles or aluminum cans.

Another benefit of reducing your food packaging: nutrition. The easiest way to avoid packaging is to buy fresh and cook at home. Produce comes “naked,” and you can skip the bag inside the box of granola by baking oats at home, reducing your intake of added sugar and other chemicals. It’s nearly impossible to reduce packaging on cheese, but I, for one, can afford to cut back on cheese.

One final benefit: THE AESTHETIC. Peep Pinterest for more simplified pantries, like this one from Thriving On Plants. It’s balm for the soul.

Again, I’m not a scientist, engineer, or sociologist, so except for my citations, this could all be total bologna. But I find domesticity fascinating, and I had to share. So this concludes this week’s episode of “what is going on in this girl’s head and why is she blogging about it!?” Sending love to you and our planet.