Re-reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma with my students and got to thinking: yeah, I can try and eat real food, not food-like substances. But I thought about another approach that might be helpful:

Don’t bring anything contained in plastic into your house.

For us, this would mean the following:

we would have to buy our meat at a butcher so it would come wrapped in paper. Not easy but between Whole Wallet and Wegmans, we could probably do it.

we would have to buy our bread at a bakery. We have two terrific bakeries within a mile of our house — Four Worlds and Metropolitan — so that’s within range. Of course, we’d have to convince our kids to eat bread with “things in it” but again, possible.

fruits and vegetables are probably the easiest and the no plastic prohibition would encourage this because these can be bought loose. We love orange juice but I’m betting I could find enough juice oranges to make this work because orange juice is expensive. Or we could just buy orange juice in a glass container.

pasta — harder. Almost all the pasta we buy comes in a box with a plastic sleeve. I have a pasta machine but I am not making pasta on a regular basis. Have to check the packaging next time I’m in the store — does at least one pasta company trust that people know the difference between vermicelli and spaghetti enough to have all cardboard packaging — or see if there’s a place to buy dry pasta (I don’t think our local coop has enough dry pasta to pull this off) We could buy rice in big sacks — do those sacks have a big of plastic in them — so that’s within range.

Then we’re left with all the snack foods — pretzels, dried bagel chips, chips, granola bars — which we could certainly, certainly live without. Some, like granola bars and bagel chips, I could make with enough free time. And none of these foods are necessary.

Not only would this approach help with eating, it would address our trash each week. Even after recycling and composting, we still have a single garbage can that we manage to fill up each week. Some of that is cat litter, some of it is wasted food that I can’t compost, but nearly all of it is non-recyclable plastic.

Just an idea that I’m sure someone else had first.