less is more

ok first day of november and the first test - and i wouldn't say we failed but it's mighty hard to be plastic free. i meant to go round to the local nut shop (yes ha ha) and see if i could get some of the usually packaged stuff like rice and pasta in a more environmentally friendly format but by the time we were ready to shop the local market was shut so we were at the mercy of the big chain supermarket.

i'm afraid that 13 of the 36 items we bought did come in plastic packaging - for some as i had suspected there was no choice (bread and milk) or were packaged in plastic for safety reasons (paracetamol). some of the others were temporary amnesia induced by chatting to a friend (cat meat - big mistake) or the result of being nagged by children (yogurt and what is known as 'yaks' milk' chez seahorse). i was a bit surprised that you couldn't buy loose tomatoes and they only come in prepackaged sets of four but i wouldn't usually buy fruit 'n' veg at the supermarket and hadn't realised the plastic creep that has taken place...

we searched high and low for loose green tea and finally found a box hidden amongst all the tea bags (which i loathe), loo paper (aka 'guide dogs' in my house because when urbane scrumping and i first hung up our joint shingle the loo paper makers were sponsoring a campaign to raise money for the guide dogs for the blind) was easy - quite a few plastic free options. and i think the rest were tins (cat food, tinned tomatoes etc)

this is going to take more planning and scouting than my usual shopping - we shop at the local shops, try to keep things simple and use the cloth bags but this requires a whole new level of craftiness.

tomorrow we will hie ourselves down to psarakos and do the fresh grocerying and i will score better. on a positive note the kids were quite shocked at how much plastic there is and how difficult it was to find other options. i still haven't been able to think of a plastic free option for garbage bags....

here is what we had for dinner - egyptian eggplant and tamarind stew from a recipe in the guardian

and here is my transcript of the quite lengthy recipe reduced to seahorsean shorthand as i have no truck with verbose recipes....


btw there was an excellent article in the guardian this week by a writer who had done the plastic free for a month challenge. i don't think i could go as far as the man who wrapped his fish in cloth though...