By basics I mean the sort of food I buy week in week out and which I could not conceivably live without ie sugar, pasta, rice, couscous, porridge oats, noodles, pulses etc. With a bit of effort I can avoid buying biscuits and cakes and ready made meals and I can ask shopkeepers to pack meat and olives etc into my own containers, but I can hardly do the same with any of the staples mentioned above. The annoying thing is that I cannot for the life of me work out why any of them cannot be packed in paper bags or cardboard boxes. Flour and some sugars and Quaker porridge oats are readily available in paper bags and Lidl sells rice in cardboard boxes. So why isn't it standard practice with the rest? I can feel an email to a supermarket formulating in my head. Watch this space!
PS Now that our local deli has installed self service hoppers I can buy some of my staples loose, but this facility is not available to the vast majority of shoppers.
Weekly Weigh-In = 495g (including a plastic light switch and bulb weighing 150g, and 6 free Yakult bottles from the milkman at 60g). If these are discounted the total is reduced to 285g, which is still well over my target of 100g. All I can say in my defence is that we did seem to finish a number of the packets mentioned above this week!
2 comments:
I agree. We can't really say that these things are "overpackaged" as it's just a bag, but they could be more sensibly packaged. I didn't know about Quaker oats being available in a box, so thanks for that! Asian supermarkets sell 10kg bags of rice, but so far I can only find white, not brown.
I tried a local Asian supermarket for bulk buys. However I was disappointed to find that most of their goods, including their rice, was packaged in plastic of one kind or another. Although there may well be proportionately less plastic in a larger package. In India rice is often sold in jute sacks.
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