New Habits

Errands

I'm such a homebody. It takes a lot to get me to leave the farm, especially to go off the island. It's so perfect here; why would anyone want to be anywhere else?

Ananda Farm Camano Island

So when I do need to drive off island, I make it as productive a trip as possible.

I have a meeting in town every Thursday at noon, and so yesterday, I stuffed things in the car that needed to go elsewhere, the recycling, some tools I was delivering, a couple of post-office notices, and toddled off. On the way home from the meeting, I stopped at all the stores that had things we needed at the farm, and slowly wended my way back home.

Buy bulk

Buy bulk

One of the stops was a grocery store that I happen to enjoy, because it has most of the things we like to use in our cooking, and most of all, it has a large selection of bulk food. I picked out some dried fruit and a variety of nuts and seeds to make granola. We've recently unearthed our dehydrator, and I have a really good granola recipe, so we've started making our own granola again.

Single-use plastic

So I'm pouring and scooping these dried fruits, nuts, and seeds into the only containers available: plastic bags. And as the plastic bags mounted up in the grocery cart, it was obvious that even though I was being responsible in eliminating as much packaging as possible by buying bulk, I was still using all of this single-use plastic.


Sigh.

When I got home, the sewing machine was still set up, because I had those few napkins left to hem, and there, next to the sewing machine, there was sitting the white netting I had bought, all those weeks ago. It's the type of netting that someone might use for a wedding veil, a very fine netting, quite resilient, a little stretchy, and the reason I had bought it was to make produce bags.

Reusable bags

There it was. A means for eliminating one form of single-use plastic. I set the groceries on the floor, cleared off a space on the table, and stretched out the netting. I cut it into rectangles, sized similar to one of the plastic bags from the store, and ended up with 16 rectangles. That's a good number of produce bags, or, as it were, bulk bags.

Produce bags

I sewed the sides together on eight of the bags, and I'll sew the remaining eight bags today. It feels good to be able to make a change, at the household level, that shifts our economy away from single-use anything and toward sustainability.

New Habits

I've had that netting for about three months. But the sewing machine and thread were buried in our storage shed, along with all the rest of our stuff, and setting up the kitchen to get to the point that homemade granola was a possibility, then going to buy all of the ingredients and watching that pile of plastic bags bulge across the shopping cart. . . A lot of things came together yesterday in order for me to be able to take that step of reusable produce bags.

But we're on our way. The habits of high efficiency, productivity, and ease-of-use have led us into this disposable economy. But if we pay attention and shift those habits whenever we can, it's possible to get back on track.

We'll need some time to instill the new habit of remembering to take the bags into the store with us, but there's hope. We're smart people. We're actually a smart species. We can learn how to take better care of our planet, and we can take action on a household level. That's how we can change the world.

We are learning to take better care of our planet.