How does recycling work?

Here's some information about multi-stream recycling:

How Recycling Works

Making gluten-free bread

As I was making my weekly bread yesterday, it struck me how beautiful the process was -- from mixing the dry ingredients together, to adding the egg, to the risen loaf (before baking). Not only am I avoiding buying bread in plastic -- I can get most of the ingredients in bulk or cardboard containers -- but I'm also creating art and linking myself to my past, when generations of women made bread every week.

Grocery Store Thermometer - How did I do this week?

Here are my groceries for the week. On the left are the ones that are packaged in plastic, some of which might be recyclable. (Empty Tom's toothpaste tubes, for instance, can be shipped back to Tom's of Maine for free for them to recycle.) Theoretically, the company that picks up recycling in my town recycles milk cartons and #1 & 2 containers (Burt's Bees shampoo & conditioner, Coconut Milk shampoo & Coconut Water conditioner). The yogurt containers are #5s, so probably not recyclable, but I had a free coupon for the Noosa, which I couldn't resist trying. (It was very good!) Xochil chips look like they come in paper, but the inside is coated with plastic.

The groceries in the middle had minimal, but some plastic -- labels on the fruit (I brought my own bags for the produce), plastic caps on the hazelnut spread and mayonnaise, and the fish is wrapped in plastic coated paper. Next time I should remember to bring my own container for the fish.

The products on the right are either packaged in glass, foil, paper or cardboard, or were bulk items that I brought my own bags for (raisins, coffee, chocolate-covered almonds & ginger). The winners of the least packaged products this week were Hodgson Mill corn starch, Marcal toilet paper, and Frontera salsa, The Organic Valley eggs have a plastic label on the cardboard carton, and the Organic Valley butter is wrapped in tin foil, but that probably also has a plastic coating.

I'm looking forward to farmer's market season, when I can go back to buying fruit and vegetables without labels stuck on them!

Gaia Hates Plastic: I love my town

Gaia Hates Plastic: I love my town

Shopping

Today I walked to the market and did my week's shopping for produce, bulk items, and other groceries. I'll go to the butcher on Tuesday, since it's not open on Monday. I could have gone today but I didn't bring containers and quite frankly, I had enough to carry without adding more.

What I learned:

1) February is not the month to decide to do all my shopping WALKING distance from my house. Brrr!

2) I spent 60 percent of what I usually spend on groceries because I was very aware that I'd be carrying them home. I do still need to buy meat, but that's not going to make up the other 40 percent.

3) I couldn't get chocolate milk for my son, who won't drink either regular milk or milk with chocolate syrup added. (He's a little like a finicky cat, but don't say I said so. We stopped (by car) at Shoprite to pick up the chocolate milk for him. I don't expect him to go a month without milk because of my whims.)

4) It felt pretty good to be able to walk, buy groceries, and walk home in 45 minutes. That's less time than it usually takes me to shop.

So all in all, less time and less money: I'm pretty happy with my experiment.

I love my town

How great is it to be able to walk two blocks to buy fresh bread, nice cheese, organic groceries, and fresh meat at the butcher. Plus I can get my bicycle repaired and a cup of coffee at at least four coffee houses, two diners and Dunkin Donuts within a mile. Maybe that's too much coffee. Nah, never enough coffee.

So for the next month, I'm going to try to reduce my carbon footprint by walking to get all my groceries. Also, this will help with my desire to get more exercise.

This is somewhat problematic because my carbon footprint in gas to purchase groceries is very minimal compared to the fossil fuels used to grow produce with fertilizers, ship the groceries near enough to me to get them, and refrigerate them till I get there. After all, the supermarket is only 2 miles away. How much gasoline does that really take, especially in my hybrid car?

But as an exercise in appreciating what is close by (and plastic free), onward and forward.

Fun with Fermentation

In trying to cut down on plastic, I figured one of the biggest sources in my home is plastic bread bags. We eat a lot of bread. I was able to get bread for my son at a local bakery and have them put it directly in a (clean) cloth bag for me to take home.

Unfortunately, I am allergic to wheat and cow dairy, which makes grocery shopping for me much more complicated. No local bakeries that I know of make gluten-free bread and the GF bread sold at the supermarket are either wrapped in two plastic bags or a hard plastic sheath that has to be cut open. I decided to try my hand at making bread. 

One of my favorite cookbooks is Silvana's Gluten-Free and Dairy-Free Kitchen by Silvana Nardone. I used her recipe for sandwich loaf bread and made a delicious loaf. I realized I need a bigger loaf pan though because when I let the bread rise in a warm oven, it overflowed the pan and dripped on the oven floor. Yikes!

My other experiment in fermentation was Harvest Apple Beer. You may be saying, but hey, beer and wine come in recyclable glass bottles and tin cans. Why not just buy beer? Actually, I found out that many wine bottles have plastic corks and plastic sleeves near the top of the wine bottle. The inside of cans is often coated with plastic. 

My apple beer recipe was given to me many years ago, and I no longer know where I got it from. It has apples, raisins, sugar, cinnamon and clove and uses wild yeast in a one-week long fermentation process. Now I have plenty of mildly alcoholic apple beer to share throughout the holiday season.