Plastic Free on a Budget

Plastic-Free Eating, on a Budget

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I have been spending $25 a week on food, without buying plastic.

Here’s how:

A grocery shopper’s guide to eating on a budget

                A consumer’s guide to plastic-free purchasing:

Get Bulky

o   Buy bulk and bring your own containers (reusable/ paper).

o   Beans, rice, oats, flour, nuts, peanut/ almond butter, are all inexpensive bulk items that can be used in or paired with almost any meal to bulk it up.

Stay Out of the Aisles

o   There are very few plastic-free items in the aisles. When entering an aisle have a clear goal in mind (lest you get caught in the tempting web of plastic-contained items!).

o    Almost everything you need can be found on the periphery of the store: Fresh Produce, grains, meat, and dairy, and you will find much less plastic on the periphery of the store.

Make It Yourself

o   There are certain items that are packaged in plastic that we cannot live without. With these items buy the ingredients and make yourself.

o   If you cannot buy the ingredients because:

~They are in plastic

-Do everything you can to go to the original source. When making hummus I had to do this. Tahini was one of the ingredients. It came in plastic, so I made tahini too!

~Not sold in the stores.

-Find a food substitution. http://www.foodsubs.com/

~You do not know what they are (is that a food label or a chemistry book?)

For example what’s partially hydrogenated soybean oil or disodium phosphate?

-Partially hydrogenated soybean oil is a Trans fat and is not good for the heart or blood vessels. (Add a few Hydrogen atoms to Trans fat and you have plastic – that is basically what plastic is – fully hydrogenated fat.) (http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/nutrition-news/transfats/).

-Disodium phosphate is one sodium ion away from being a cleaning agent (look on the label of any T.S.P. cleaner container).

These are food additives that are not necessary in foods and are unhealthy. So, forego them (unless you want to add a cleaning agent to your hummus - yummy!)

o   I have found it very rewarding to make my own food even though its time consuming.  I love the creative process, I love using my hands, I feel flattered when people compliment the food I make, and you can make extra food to freeze or store for later. But ultimately when you make it yourself you save money (especially if you follow my next steps).

Shop the Source

o   Meet the farmer.

-When was the last time you knew the eye-color of your farmer and food provider?

-Buying from the farm or farmer can save you 50 percent or more and they can package it in paper or in your reusable container, upon request. Plus the farmer can tell you exactly how they handled, raised and grew the food. Meeting the farmer makes your relationship with food personal again.

o   Bakery

-Buy your bread at a local bakery. Most the time they use paper bags. If not, bring your own and ask them if you can pull a loaf fresh from the oven. Yum!

o   Produce Stands

-Produce stands or discount produce stores not only provide cheaper prices but often have more local foods and fresher foods. Bonus!

o   Eat in Season

The cheapest produce in the market is the produce in season. Eat in season, and save money.

I have found that not buying plastic while working with a budget has:

-          Brought me a personal relationship with my food.

-          Taught me how to cook.

-          Made me friends with my ingredients

-     Made me afraid of the ingredients I have put in my body before this goal.

-          Helped me eat healthier foods, more local foods, and fresher foods.

      -          Made me excited about life! 

Who would have thought avoiding plastic while buying my weekly groceries would do this for me? Fantastic!

Just the Beginning

I have officially not purchased plastic for 8 weeks. This may not seem like a long time, I mean I still reuse plastic existing within my realm of consciousness, I just don't buy it. So what's the big whoop? What is so hard about not buying plastic? Well give it a try. Try not consuming plastic for a week, two weeks, a month. See what happens. See what I mean.
        It all starts in the aisles of the grocery store. See what happens as you peruse the grocery aisles on your weekly shopping trip. Stop at any given moment, look within your range of view. Are you not wooed by the aggressive flirtations of plastic? Now give this a try. Hold your hands over your eyes, peek through the cracks like a kid during a sex-scene of a movie, and try not to see any plastic within the slits of your fingers. I tried this. Parades of multicolored plastic chip bags, concourses of plastic condiment and dressing bottles, plastic tags, even stickers on the fruit and vegetables-plastic bags to bag the produce and plastic knives to cut them with, with plastic signs labeling how much they cost. Plastic, plastic, plastic: the Savior of the super market. The challenge was to see anything but plastic. Even as I gazed at the ceiling, curtains of plastic hung displaying the food in that aisle. No matter how hard I tried plastic impregnated my view. Whether it was the container, or part of the product, when in a store, I was wooed by the unending lines of part-plastic products waiting to be used like a hooker in the night, a one night stand with plastic.

My commitment to non-plastic life was planted in my mind, in freshman biology. Professor Gates asked all of the students (hundreds in the class) to write a paper about how to lessen our ecological footprint. He suggested a quiz at www.myfootprint.org measuring how much "nature" it would take to sustain our individual lifestyles. Although I was already an earth conscious person, according to the ecological footprint quiz, if everybody lived the way I did, it would take 4.15 earths to sustain the human race’s lifestyle. Yet I discovered an average American's lifestyle would take 7 earths to sustain. 

Wow! Instant awareness of how much I was trashing the world. Something had to change for me. I was determined to know how I could live in congruence with the earth instead of in competition with it. Previously my mentality was subconsciously like some game, "okay earth, let's see who will cause the other to cease to exist first, you or me. Ready, set, go!" This is not a game!  At this point I made an ardent effort to figure out how I could reduce my waste.  I realized going non-plastic would completely eradicate my waste creation and decrease my ecological footprint significantly.  So this year for my New Year's Resolution I decided to stop purchasing plastic. I do not support the consumption and waste of plastic. I reuse plastic that I find, or that I already have, but I do not purchase it. My philosophy behind not using plastic came from the realization that plastic is not biodegradable, it is often not recyclable, and the majority of my waste is plastic.… And I was just one person out of millions adding to this.

I am approaching this New Year’s resolution with the question ‘is this even possible?’ Well that’s where we will see. I, Rose Allred, am not purchasing plastic for one year.  I commit to this.

Well what’s the big deal with plastic? What is so wrong about the incomprehensible amounts of plastic around us in any given second?  What’s wrong with throwing away my coke bottle, or my cheese wrapper, or my iPod touch packaging bubbles? Good question. And these are the very questions I am exploring this year as I refrain from what feels like the inevitable: plastic.