Week 7 - Plastic Basics Packets

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!