
No matter how much we talk about the environment, no matter how many times we're told to decrease our waste, we're inundated with food products. They are practically suffocating with extra or unrecyclable packaging. I write this as someone who not only finds it ridiculous to buy products that result in tons of hard-to-reuse waste the minute you get it home and unpackage it, but also as someone who has a cap on the amount of garbage that's picked up free of charge.
This isn't just an argument for the environment -- the space available to dump garbage continues to be a problem, so why fill it with needless waste? Save it for the garbage that's much harder to prevent. It's a matter of common sense. Do you want to waste space on fleeting convenience, or the garbage that you can't avoid?
The biggest culprit is styrofoam. My god, it's everywhere, and in most cases, highly unnecessary. The saran+styrofoam combo is rampant in grocery stores -- with meats, vegetables, sliced cheeses, mushrooms. Since much of the food doesn't last long in that packaging, like mushrooms and meats, it must be unwrapped and used immediately, or repackaged in something else to maintain freshness or freeze. The styrofoam is left behind -- useless, unrecyclable. And cheese slices -- my god, I've seen four slices of cheese wrapped this way before -- which is particularly infuriating when it's right next to the same cheese on a deli counter that can be sliced on request and slipped inside one small plastic bag.


As hard as it is to believe, the New Year is almost upon us and with that new year comes a
To be honest I have no idea what this site is all about; well, I do. It is
On its way to the Senate, after getting approved by the house, is a bill that would require all states to
have
Though it may seem as though the food processing industry is constantly trying to improve on nature,
twisting it into new and more appealing forms, sometimes it turns out that they are not trying to improve on it as much
as they are trying to help it compete with the ever growing range of packaged products. With consumers asking for more
natural and more organic products, it would seem that they would turn back to old standbys, like nature's
single-serving snack: the apple. The problem with the apple is that it is not as easy to eat as a bag of chips, there's
a low "munchability" factor that would drive you to reach for more. Today's consumers are used to having
a product go straight from the package to their mouth, without having to pick it apart - or bite off pieces a bit at a
time. Packaging Nature's finest into a convenient, ready to eat form takes more work that you would think, despite the
fact that apples come off the tree ready to eat. The New York Times Magazine did a great job 









