basilbias.com

June 21-June 27, 2009

Plastic Sticker
Discovered when I went to use my new cast-iron pot to make vegetable stock.

Three Produce Stickers
One from a lemon, two from nectarines.

Plastic-Windowed Box
I ordered lasagna noodles from Planet Organics because I needed another item to complete my order. They were very good, but I will try to find them in bulk next time.

Plastic-lined Jar Lid
From Muir Glen organic tomato sauce, which I bought rather than a plastic-lined can of tomatoes. The sauce was so innocent-looking in its glass jar and metal lid, who knew there was plastic lurking just inside? In the summer, I usually make tomato sauce from scratch, but tomatoes aren’t quite in season yet and a lasagna was in order, due to the tofu ricotta I made way too much of last week.

Cap
From a tamari bottle that ran out.

Seal
From the new tamari bottle I subsequently opened.

Piece of Tape
I forget what this came off of.

Expired Credit Card
Shown cut-up in the photo for obvious reasons.

Stencil Cut-Outs
We stenciled old t-shirts to wear to the Dyke March.

Plastic Cup
From the March. Inexcusable, I know. I was very thirsty and I forgot my water bottle. (I did my penance though, carrying a sticky cup around for the rest of the day…)

Total Number of Items: 12
Total Weight: 1 ¼ Ounces

This week, besides the plastic cup, I refused to buy anything I knew contained plastic. Between avoiding all animal products and all plastic, I have to say this made my grocery shopping incredibly difficult. For instance, I wanted to make burritos, but all the tortillas and vegan cheeses came in plastic. So I didn’t get them, thinking I could do without the cheese and make the tortillas from scratch. When the time came, however, I was rushed and so ended up making a sort of cheese-and-tortilla-less Mexicanesque stir-fry. Not one of my culinary masterpieces, to be sure. (My friends, though, were very sweet and ate it anyway.)
How long will I be able to keep this up? Although I’ve always been pretty good at doing without things, in combination with my old ones,[1] my new purchasing restriction (nothing packaged in plastic) seems a little extreme even for me.
But I think the difficulty lies in the planning,[2] since in most cases it’s the convenience and not the taste of plastic-wrapped foods that their homemade counterparts lack.

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[1] (Nothing new [besides food and undergarments,] nothing grown with pesticides, nothing produced where workers were likely to have been paid unfair wages, nothing sold at large chain stores, and nothing containing animal products.)

[2] Case in point: I went to the grocery store this week without a list. If I had taken the trouble to look up a recipe beforehand, my stir-fry would most likely have taken a more palatable form, with or without the tortillas.