Plastic-Free Food

Delicious organic biodynamic milk and cream in glass bottles - but with a giant sticker.. what is all that about?

What I have learned about plastic-free eating: lots of vegies. And eggs. And lots of cooking.

Food you can't buy without plastic wrap: tortillas, flatbread, sushi nori, rice paper rolls, crackers, biscuits, teabags, non-gourmet cheese, dips, butter (even the foil wrapper has a plastic lining), any meat from the farmers market, ice cream, chips, pasta, sliced bread, crumpets.

Food you can buy plastic-free if you have a fabulous bulk bin shop like I do: flour, sugar and all the baking requirements, spelt pasta, dried beans, rice and grains, cereals, loose teas, spices, nuts, seeds, dried fruit, honey, peanut butter, oil, condiments, chocolate covered goji berries.

Food you can buy plastic-free from local shops: bread, cakes, biscuits, slices, meat (if they let you bring your own container), gourmet cheese (if they wrap it in tissue paper), fruit, veg, eggs, flour, milk and cream in cartons or glass. Food in cans or glass bottles.

Food you can buy plastic-free from the supermarket: fruit, veg, eggs, flour. Milk and cream in cartons. Food in cans or glass bottles. Edited to add, from comments: Butter in paper, sugar in paper.

My takeaway from this is: the global food industry couldn't exist without plastic. Local food bought fresh is mostly what you get when eating plastic-free.

Even my fabulous bulk bin shop isn't plastic-free - after all, the lentils don't arrive direct from heaven in crates made from compressed rose petals and delivered by angels. They arrive from India in a plastic bag inside a cardboard box. The reason this is a good thing is that twenty people can go home with a kilo of lentils each and only one plastic bag is used. The same effect can be achieved by buying a twenty kilo bag of lentils from the Asian grocer and sharing it out with nineteen of your best friends. And if you do not have a bulk bin shop near you, this is an excellent alternative.

But only really local food can come unpackaged. Bread straight from the oven. Veg from the farm. There is a shop down the street that sells pasta made on the premises. It just occurred to me I could ask them to pop some in a container for me. So for options if I don't want to cook?

Recently I read about an adorable 'buy home-cooked food for dinner' set-up called Josephine. Home cooks make dinner, and you order it, turn up at their house, pop dinner in your Tupperware and off you go. If you live in the US you can give this a go. I think this would work anywhere among friends, without having to wait for a San Francisco start-up to come to a neighbourhood near you. Plastic-free takeaway.

Meanwhile, I am going to pop up the hill and buy chips from the food vans at the park. Everything is served in cardboard and paper bags, which I will use as fire starters tomorrow, because nothing starts the fire better than fat-soaked cardboard. Thanks, bearded millenial food truck entrepreneurs, for getting it.