recycling

  • Challenge Update,  Food Stamps,  frugal,  green,  plastic,  recycling,  sustainable living

    fresh fruit & veg

    One of my favorite weekly outings is to the Alameda Farmers’ Market — we’re lucky enough to have a twice-weekly market about a mile or so from my house. Yes, it’s a bike ride away. I take my own bags, fill up the panniers and pedal home again. Easy peasy. Even better, none of the produce that I buy at the farmers’ market has even one of those stupid fruit labels on it. Plastic! ptooey! There was a funny Rhymes with Orange comic printed a few years ago that cracked me up: The lady is sitting in front of an x-ray machine and the doctor sees all these fruit labels…

  • Challenge Update,  family,  food,  frugal,  green,  My World and Welcome to It,  no waste,  plastic,  recycling,  sustainable living

    shoppy shop talk, Part I

    I’m back from a full day of grocery shopping and exploring non-plastic items. I went to three stores today as well as the farmers’ market and a small cheese shop. I have good news to report almost everywhere, except at the bank. There, the news is scary. See that shopping cart in the photo? Those two bags of groceries cost me $98. (falls over in dead faint…) There’s so much to tell that I’m gonna spread this over two days. Because who doesn’t want to talk about food prices and plastic, ad nauseum? I do, I do!! Today I went to Lucky, CVS, Alameda Natural Grocery, Farmstead Cheeses and Wines, and the Alameda…

  • Challenge Update,  frugal,  green,  My World and Welcome to It,  no waste,  plastic,  recycling,  sustainable living

    Punked by Plastic

    I was punked by plastic. In my grocery shopping adventures Thursday, I cheerfully bought two (minuscule and pricey) glass jars of mustard, and when putting them away, discovered Ambient Plastic (unnecessary extra plastic) bands around the lids. Why? Why is this necessary? (insert existential yawp here.) I opened the waxed paper bag of salami I bought at the deli counter yesterday, after expressly forbidding the use of plastic in my order, and found the thin blue plastic sheet she used to load up the bag and not get her hand greasy. I guess they always throw that into the customer’s package? I wonder if they couldn’t use some tongs or a fork,…