Living Without Plastic: Day Two

Today we're doing the big shop for the week ahead.  This would usually be a Sunday afternoon supermarket trip to maximise the freshness of food for the week – but our shopping today will involve the butcher, the greengrocer and the fishmonger and they are not open on a Sunday.

I'm dreading it and we have a WONDERFUL time. It's a sunny day and we’re very lucky where we live to have some good independent shops and a pedestrian street where the shops are all close to each other. I honestly don’t think it takes us any longer than if we went around the supermarket.

In terms of cost I think the individual items – particularly meat and fish are more expensive but we are much more focussed on the shopping list we started with – I am not distracted by superfluous purchases (apart from some gigantic shell-on prawns in the fishmonger!) and so the total for the meat, fish and veg ends up about the same as our usual cost.

The real advantage to shopping this way is that the children love it.  They are in and out of the shops, enjoying the fresh air, getting a quick run around.  Everything in the shops is at their eye level, they aren’t hemmed in by huge towering aisles and they interact with the produce in a way that they would not otherwise have.  They pick up a courgette and an aubergine and can feel their skins, and the difference between them – which in most supermarkets would not have happened.  Although I’m not sure that they were as keen on the giant prawns as I was.

We take tupperwares with us and the meat and fish is put directly into these.  It feels a bit “attention seeking” to ask for the produce in this way, and the more I try to explain why, the more I feel like a giant cliché.  But I persevere and by the time I get to shop number 3 it feels more comfortable.

The green grocers is less rewarding than I was expecting – a lot more of the fruit and veg are wrapped in plastic than I had hoped.  I'm 3 shops in though and evangelical about my plastic free mission so I have a good conversation with the green grocer about it.  Apparently the plastic on cucumbers for example is just the way that they come from the farm.  He too punnets up the fruit – things like blueberries, grapes, strawberries and raspberries, to create a unit price for each of them.  He will transfer them into brown paper bags for us but I can’t choose how many grapes I get – it has to be a punnets worth.  But he will reuse the plastic packaging so its a win for us both.  Tupperware come in handy again here for the blueberries and raspberries that would have been squashed in the brown paper.

We end up going home without spinich, lettuce, cucmber and tomaotes as there aren’t any plastic free – but we’ve got some beautiful looking, giant vegetables which look to be a much higher quality than you’d typically see in the supermarket.

As I unpack without unwrapping a thing I feel like we're doing something really here. The kids are happy, I'm excited about the food choices we've made and the conversations I've had.  I feel more wholesome somehow, more connected to the actual food, rather than a consumer buying another package.

But its only day two....