As you may have read earlier in our blog posts (LINK) in preparation to coming home and prior to the pandemic we were going to challenge ourselves to decrease our trash waist in an effort to help our planet and get into some better habits with where we bought our food from. However, pandemic’s change a lot of things including what foods are available and in what packaging they come in.
At the beginning of March when the pandemic started to become real and we were filling up our pantry with our staples we were sticking to our decreased waist plan and were buying in bulk stores filling our own bags with things like, lentils, oats and much more. This was working pretty good.
However, as the threat of COVID-19 become more extreme in the US we were coming to the realization that getting to a grocery store in the near future might not be possible, at least on a regular basis. We found that there were some items that were sold out of stores or simply couldn’t be found in a bulk option. An example of this was chickpeas, tomato sauce and salsa. Dried chickpeas were sold out of everywhere and tomato products were not being sold in bulk. We initially skipped over these items due to our decrease waist goal for ourselves.
I figured for a lot of these ‘hard to find in bulk’ items I would just make them myself. Well, that’s cost effective if I am the one browsing the grocery stores snagging cheap bags of “imperfect produce” or grabbing a mesh bag of this or that veggie when it’s on sale. But since we have been ordering our groceries online for store pick-up, browsing for sales is non-existent. We’re lucky if the things we want are even still in stock. We have a saying in our house, “you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.” So, we order our groceries and are thankful for what we get and that we have the option to get anything at all without setting foot in a store.
For now, we are doing our best to be good to this wonderful planet we live in with the things we choose to purchase but we are making some exceptions with containers to keep up sane, our family eating healthy. I do primarily make our pasta, tortillas, chips, crackers and our bread but once in a while it has been nice to take the pressure off me and buy a box of pasta, for example.
After this pandemic is part of our past, whenever that might be, we may try to pick up where we left off with decreasing our waist to the extreme, but for now, what we’re doing suits us just fine.