getting desensitized

I've been working at a coffee shop part time for the past several weeks, and I'm afraid it's having a negative impact on my commitment to living plastic-free.

We just use so much plastic! All the time. And I quickly stop noticing, it so quickly becomes automatic.

The first time I noticed was when I grabbed a day old muffin to eat on the way home after work. We bake muffins every day, and at the end of the night any muffins left over (usually only one or two, if any) get wrapped in plastic and put on a plate to be sold the next day as 'day olds'. So one day I was on my way to another job and needed a snack to get me there so I grabbed a day old muffin, plastic wrap and all. Didn't even think twice about it.

Not buying plastic-wrapped food is one of the EASIEST things to do to cut down on plastic consumption! And here I was, not even thinking about it.

The other day I caught myself using a rubber glove to mix the scone batter.

And here we come back to a something I posted about earlier: food safety.

If I'm using my hands to mix scone batter, is it ok if they are just well washed? Or should I use the rubber (plastic?) glove? Which would you rather have touching your scone before you eat it?

bread, cheese and yogurt - to live without? or make your own?

I bought bread yesterday, for the first time since starting this project.

It's been a bit of a puzzle. Bread generally comes in plastic bags and even when it doesn't, paper bag-wrapped French bread, say, how am I to keep it fresh without storing it in a plastic bag?

I keep reminding myself that there was a time before plastic, and many of these activities were undertaken in that time. So what did people do about bread? I'm thinking they mostly ate the bread before it went stale, and my roommate pointed out that they probably also ate stale bread. That is, after all, how French toast began, is it not? Ok, so I decided to get bread at some point and see how I did with it. But I'd been having a tough time finding some. I hadn't looked very hard, mind you, but there wasn't anything good in the Safeway, and all of the bread at the bakery down the road was in plastic bags, not paper. I'm sure I could have gone to that bakery with a paper bag, but I wasn't that inspired by the bread, and just generally not that keen. I've also been thinking about baking bread, or biscuits, or buns. I was out yesterday hunting for the ingredients to make 'nutty oat cakes' from my Nut Gourmet cookbook, actually, which brought me to the Greek food store looking at bulk nuts, where I saw bread in paper bags.

I hadn't even realized how much I had been wanting bread until I saw the little round loaf (I could easily finish that off in a day or two, I thought) in the paper bag. It wasn't even waxed paper, just regular plain paper. It was a really good loaf of bread too, multigrain, sour dough, my mouth was watering just looking at it.

So I bought it. It was the only thing I got at the store, although I did take note of the dried cranberries they sell in bulk there, and the cheaper price for bulk walnuts.

It was $4.50. For a small loaf of bread. Unbelievable.

Damn tasty bread, though. And the avocado-cheese sandwhiches I made with it were amazing.

Oh, that's the other thing. I broke down and bought cheese. I couldn't help it, I love it too much! And I'd gone without for pretty much two weeks. I saw it in the cooler and it was calling to me...

I haven't given up my yogurt habit yet, either, but I'm still on the lookout for a suitable incubator, and once I find one I really will start making my own!