Small Sustainable Swaps – Plastic Packaging

by Liz Child

Did you make any sustainable new years resolutions?

Resolutions are a nice idea but often it’s impossible to stick to a big, drastic change. So we suggest making a series of small sustainable swaps, they all add up. Here’s how we can help with one area – plastic packaging. Choosing to buy products without petrochemical based plastics sends a clear message to big companies and producers, there is a better way!

Our fruits and vegetables are delivered plastic free, nationwide to every address in Ireland and Northern Ireland, and we use compostable bags for things like salad and spinach leaves that need that extra protection. If you are on one of our local routes (in green on the map below) then we collect and re-use the cardboard boxes too! Some of our deliveries are with a courier company (in orange on the map below) so we can’t collect those boxes yet unfortunately, but they are compostable or recyclable so please dispose of them responsibly.

As well as our fresh produce, we deliver organic groceries and we are always looking at the most sustainable options. We have a growing plastic free aisle and here are a few of our favourites from the plastic free swaps we’ve been making recently.

Herbs and Spices – Plastic Free Refills

Sonnentor are our new herb and spice supplier. We love the organic contents of course, they are high quality and full of amazing flavour to make our dishes sing. But we are also really impressed with the packaging. The contents are protected in clever, compostable bags and then packaged in lovely sustainably sourced cardboard boxes. Read more about Sonnentor here. Add some of our selection to your next order here.

Grains, Pulses, Dried Fruit, Nuts and Seeds – Refills (in compostable bags)

We now have a really useful range of nuts, seeds, dried fruit and grains in compostable bags. Perfect for refilling jars in your kitchen. We love having big jars of ingredients like these visible in our kitchen, they remind us to cook from scratch and have healthy snack bowls. The clear visibility makes writing a shopping list of what we are running low on easy! Check out our range here and here.

Plastic Free Teas

Did you know that most tea bags contain plastic? Not good for us and certainly not good for our compost bins! We stock a lovely selection of plastic free, organic teas here.

Chocolate!

Chocolate is a bit of a sustainability minefield. Cocoa production is linked to child labour, slavery, deforestation, and low wages. So how can concerned chocolate lovers make the most sustainable and ethical purchases? As well as researching different brands on their cocoa sourcing, choose bars with biodegradable packaging. For example, our Vivani bars are wrapped in a protective, compostable film which performs like regular plastic. It is made from sustainably sourced wood fibres. The paper and cardboard packaging is also FSC® certified and printed using mineral oil-free inks. Check out our sustainable chocolates here.

Eco Toiletries

Switching to bamboo toothbrushes and shampoo bars is an easy way to massively cut down your plastic consumption in the bathroom. We are really impressed with our shampoo bars, they smell incredible and really work! Check out our eco toiletries here.

Simple, Real Food

by Kenneth Keavey

Yesterday my daughter Ella went down the fields and harvested a big bunch of kale she wanted to make kale crisps. I was impressed, who am I to stand in the way of a child who wants to voluntarily eat kale, I thought to myself!

Mostly though it is the other way around, often getting our kids to eat more vegetables can be a struggle, why is this? Why isn’t eating an apple, (or indeed kale crisps) instead of a chocolate bar easier? Why is doing the right thing sometimes so difficult? 

Why is our food system not better, healthier, kinder to us and our planet. How did we get ourselves into this crazy retail race to the bottom and how come it is so hard to value and want to eat real food? 

Both questions are linked. I did a stent in a major pharmaceutical company in the US as a research scientist. A friend of mine at the time worked in the food division, occasionally she would bring cookies to lunch for us to try that had been engineered in her lab to within an inch of their lives. Texture, flavour, taste, and crumbliness had all been optimised in the lab to allow just the right amount of sugar fat and salt to hit our taste buds in the right way at the right time to make them irresistible.  

Many of the processed foods including health bars and vitamin drinks that line supermarket shelves are about as healthy as eating spoonful’s of sugar, generally they contain high amounts of processed apple juice or conventional cereal and sugar substitutes. They rely on wonderfully creative science and marketing to make us believe how good for us they are, and of course they taste amazing.

We are sold the idea of free choice, but the reality is that nearly all of the big brands on our shelves are made by 10 giant multinational conglomerates. An industry built on cheap commodity products wrapped and packaged and sold as healthy, driven by profit, derived from a complex unsustainable food chain produces most of our food and it is damaging our health and destroying the planet.

So how is this system fair? How is it that these processed products have taken centre stage and are often seen by us the consumer as a prized food that can be sold for maximum profit? This is the carefully constructed reality we have been fed, it is not our fault it is just the way it.

It is simple, cheap commodity ingredients are processed and packaged to be sold as healthy alternatives to real food, that achieve maximum profit for manufactures and retailers. 

Deciphering what is good for our health and the planet is next to impossible these days. But it doesn’t have to be so complicated. 

There is one extremely straightforward step any one of us can take right now to revolutionise our food choices, the principle is simple: 

“EAT MORE FRESH ORGANIC PRODUCE”

We cannot eat too many vegetables and vegetables in all their guises are good for us. That’s pretty simple right?

So, choosing fresh organic locally grown food and working more fruit and veg into our daily routine is a magnificent way to improve how we feel and our long-term health, not to mention the benefits for the planet. 

So, Ella, go for it, all the kale in the world is yours!

Kenneth

Get a box of real, simple organic food delivered to your door anywhere in Ireland or Northern Ireland here.