People have sent me this link because I've reduced my food packaging to filling less than one load of trash per year (which I blog about http://joshuaspodek.com/avoiding-food-packaging-2) and my diet has become more delicious, cheaper, more social, healthier, and more accessible for people in food deserts, who have invited me to help them cook this way.
People also keep suggesting I start a restaurant since the food tastes so good and is so easy to make. I'm waiting to meet the right person with experience starting restaurants.
I'm posting because while everyone who knows the numbers considers the amount of food waste and packaging we create unconscionable, what I don't think people realize is that what the food industry purports to solve -- that industrial food is more convenient or tastes more appealing -- is all wrong compared to once you learn to cook. Then from scratch is faster, cheaper, more delicious, more convenient. The backbone of industrial food is ignorance and lack of skill. In places with tons of fast food restaurants but no farmers markets or fresh produce, the best solution is more cooking from scratch to teach people to demand fresh. The transition is hard, but doable and a great project for enterprising people who want to help people improve their lives and communities. I find it tremendously rewarding.
Read your blog post and there are 2 remarks I'd like to make:
> You just go to the store, buy food without packaging, and don’t buy food with packaging.
This is kind of a truism and a circular reference. You avoid food packaging by not buying food with packaging. I don't have the option of buying any fluid dairy product (or anything fluid more or less) in anything but a carton or plastic bottle/cup. And that's just an example, many other items simply don't come in a non-packaged form, or it's lower quality when bought in bulk, even if it's cheaper. If it's cheaper and better I think it's a no-brainer that people would go for it.
> the farm I get most of my summer and fall vegetables from [...] how much more flavor they have than what stores sell
It's great if you have this option of buying from a farm but it's not a sustainable one for most. In the countries that could make the biggest difference with food packaging very few have no access to such a farm. And the supply of "wholesome, farm grown, bio" food is limited. Either the price would skyrocket due to the huge demand, or they would be less "wholesome" and more "supermarket".
It's the same as when you hear that "everybody should buy second had stuff because it helps the environment and it's cheaper". There's a bit of hidden paradox in there.
My local stores don’t even have scales at the cash. You/someguy weigh items in-store and put a label on a closed package. Expensive items (e.g. seasonal shortages of premium) go prepackaged.
My grocery store sells milk from a local dairy in glass bottles with a bottle return program ($1-2 deposit on the bottles depending on size). The only waste is the plastic cap on top. Returning the bottles is a mild inconvenience.
Obviously (and unfortunately) this is not available everywhere.
Our largest local dairy runs retail stores and sold their milk this way too (although they used heavy reusable plastic bottles rather than glass). It was awesome.
Sadly, they stopped doing that a number of years ago, and now just use the standard disposable plastic jugs.
I get butter, cheese, and sour cream at a local zero waste shop. We don't use dairy milk though, just nut milk and oat milk where we buy the nuts and oats in bulk and blend with water.
The point was to get rid of packaging entirely, not just replace plastic packaging with paper or glass. I can't really see how I can hygienically procure and transport many basic food products and types without packaging.
This being said I think using and reusing more durable packaging should be the way forward. Glass in particular is one type that can be reused instead of recycled. I grew up with glass bottles (unbranded 0.5l and 1l) being reused and you'd trade an empty one in to get a full one. Most of the liquid stuff we had around the house was stored in these identical glass bottles instead of 100 different sizes and shapes of bottles.
I mean, I just bring some bags to the store and fill them up! And bottles for laundry detergent, oils, etc. Several of these zero waste shops opened in my city (an eastern European capital) the past couple of years.
This is infeasible across the entire supply chain lifecycle. IMHO what is more realistic and feasible is putting an end to our packaging winding up in our landfills, and instead using energy maintaining durable and recyclable packaging. Accounting for the trillions spent on a military umbrella over oil regions and transport modes, the total energy and monetary cost switching to a zero-landfill packaging model would be a lower footprint.
I prefer glass containers with standardized composition, and ground glass joint stopper lids; for larger containers that cannot be held in a circular format that ground glass joints seem to require, I use glass rectangular containers with plastic lids (switching over to glass/stainless with silicone lids when my current containers break, as such options weren't available back when I originally purchased them).
The containers can be any shape, but as long as the type of glass is uniform, they are infinitely recyclable and cheap and easy to re-process (bonus if we use solar thermal-based processes to re-melt the broken glass). There is a one-time shipping cost to obtain the container that is much more expensive than throwaway-thin plastic containers, but it can be refilled endlessly until it breaks by accident; thick, removable neoprene skins can reduce breakage frequency by supplying a more non-slip surface to handle and offering some protection against minor bumps.
The supply chain reconfiguration is a bigger problem, though. Very few zero-waste stores have switched to receiving goods in Intermediate Bulk Containers (IBC). These are cost-efficient to transport because 18 standard 1000l IBC fit in a standard 20 ft. ISO container, and 2 special 820l IBC's can fit in the leftover space in that ISO container. Short of sending the goods in a dedicated ISO container (which only the largest distribution centers could afford to tie up capital in), it is the closest I can think of a large retail location being able to support, and even that is a stretch for some of the smaller stores.
Even so, very few manufacturers will distribute in IBC's. For example, I corresponded by email with Dr. Bronner's, and the largest size they will ship is a 5 gallon carboy they won't refill.
Then there are challenges with refill and re-supply, as well as ensuring the IBC's are made entirely of infinitely recyclable components. We can use stainless steel IBC's, but they're extraordinarily expensive. With many products, filling into customer-supplied containers raises sanitation challenges to resolve.
Another challenge I see is re-configuring the supply chain and consumer behavior will not lead to most of the savings passed onto consumers. That will stillborn any other similar environmentally-friendly but change-intensive infrastructure initiatives we badly need.
If we get to completely-automated fulfillment centers and delivery, then we might be able to solve the sanitation challenges with automated cleaning and disinfection (though that might take upwards of three hours with a cleaning process that follows prion-contamination protocols).
I'm starting at the consumer-end with glass containers and bulk products for now. I cringe when I see the bulk products come in throwaway plastic bags in usually-throwaway cardboard boxes. Baby steps first.
She's one of my role models. Sorry I forget which videos cover dairy specifically, but I remember her talking about cheese and her secrets to get workers to put it in containers she brought. I think meat too.
In my experience, people who talk like this will gush about how a handful of seeds or a kale salad is more delicious than a cheeseburger or a burrito, which of course taste unnatural and disgusting. It's like talking to a breatharian
One very simple thing people can do that costs no money and they can keep buying exactly the same products they do now -- just less of it -- is stop overeating.
> People also keep suggesting I start a restaurant since the food tastes so good and is so easy to make. I'm waiting to meet the right person with experience starting restaurants.
I know a couple of successful restaurateurs in my area. It's an incredibly difficult business to be in. I would suggest that nobody opens a restaurant unless it's truly their love.
If you're near Manhattan, contact me and invite yourself over. I host about 20 lunches and dinners a month, partly to share how to do it. I've also done corporate events, for example last Earth Day at Lululemon's flagship store on 5th Avenue.
That’s interesting. My grandma (who is also a self-growing plantation lady) always complains that store tomatoes are tasteless. But that is offset by the price. She works all day growing them, and stores try to sell good vegetables sometimes, but prices are putting buyers off. “Chinese chemical synthetics” are much cheaper and affordable. I tried to calculate, out of pure scientific interest, and with my income I could not allocate enough time to not get serious net negative, even if was interested in shoveling and taste. Maybe it’s a local thing.
How much time and money do you spend on growing these?
I've lived in some places where you can find local-farmer markets, where you can get high quality locally sourced vegetables, fruit, diary, eggs, fish, etc. In some places they're cheaper than store-bought, in others they're competitively priced or more expensive. My point being that you don't always have to choose between the extremes of storebought v. self-grown.
Part of my family participates in a local collective that buys local produce directly from producers in bulk, and in such a way they get cheap produce and can offer good prices to producers (because the middle-man is cut out). You might have something like that where you live.
Migrant labor, agricultural subsidies, petro-chemical subsidies, and transportation subsidies (socialized roads) have resulted in the current state of affairs.
The rural poor in the US still grow much of their own food. Even the not-so-poor. City dwellers need this super cheap, industrialized food, not the rest of us.
I wouldn’t call that effortless, unless you already have a piece of land, live there and don’t need to go to the city for prolonged times. E.g. for me that would mean owning a car* , renting a parking lot at workplace, owning some land, paying for a greenhouse (idk maybe tomatoes do not need one, but in general gh counts as a taxable building here). And of course paying/shoveling the dirt. It is not effortless at all, unless there are prerequisites.
No idea why my question made few people upset, since I’m not against homegrown things and only explained how it all doesn’t work locally and interested in economics of those for whom it works.
* blasphemy for US folks, I know, but pretty valid option to not have one in my downtown; everything is cheap to rent and very close to each other.
I grow my tomatoes and it is definitely not effortless. You need to plant the seeds in little pots, keep them in a sunlit but protected area, plant and support them, water them regularly. You also need a patch of land. None of that is a big deal, but considering how cheap commercial tomatoes are, it doesn't make economic sense for most people.
Another thing to consider is that tomatoes are seasonal. You won't have more than 3 months of natural homegrown tomatoes a year.
Is it worth it? IMHO, totally. Tomatoes are one of these products where homegrown is much better than the usual commercial varieties. But if all you want are good tomatoes, and don't enjoy the process, there are probably other, more economical ways of getting them.
People also keep suggesting I start a restaurant since the food tastes so good and is so easy to make. I'm waiting to meet the right person with experience starting restaurants.
I'm posting because while everyone who knows the numbers considers the amount of food waste and packaging we create unconscionable, what I don't think people realize is that what the food industry purports to solve -- that industrial food is more convenient or tastes more appealing -- is all wrong compared to once you learn to cook. Then from scratch is faster, cheaper, more delicious, more convenient. The backbone of industrial food is ignorance and lack of skill. In places with tons of fast food restaurants but no farmers markets or fresh produce, the best solution is more cooking from scratch to teach people to demand fresh. The transition is hard, but doable and a great project for enterprising people who want to help people improve their lives and communities. I find it tremendously rewarding.