Serious question: how does it "cost less"? As OP notes, buying without plastic is a privilege due to the luxury goods pricing model attached to eco-friendly products.
If you blindly shift to whatever the store is promoting, you'll pay more.
I joined CSAs (if you're around NYC, I recommend mine http://joshuaspodek.com/where-to-buy-the-best-food-around-ne...). Dried beans and lentils are a couple dollars a pound, pre-soaked and pre-cooked.
I learned to buy in season, which means the ripest things are in greatest quantity at low prices, plus they vary. I'm swimming in tomatoes now, for example, and they taste incredible. A couple months ago it was lettuce.
I also get to know the vendors at the farmers market, and they give me a lot of free produce as a regular.
Buying with plastic is a privilege -- externalizing the costs of cleaning your pollution to poorer communities and future generations.
I hope that we'll end subsidies that force me to pay for meat, other standard American diet ingredients I don't eat, and fossil fuels transporting foods across the country and around the world which would make prices reflect their costs.
You can go to a butcher they wrap up the meat in hair thin plastic bag instead of the bulky one in supermarkets.
If you go to a grocer/farmers market you buy almost all things lose. Packaging is an entirely different industry with people adding their own (usually substantial) margins.
In Lidl nowadays they sell loose nuts etc, also cheaper then prepackaged ones.
You dont have to buy cashew in organic bamboo leaf packaging hand crafted by Cambodian virgins, just bring your reusable bag.
First, where I live, in sunny suburban Houston.
There are definitely no places around here that sell fresh meat, nuts, grains, beans, etc without plastic for less than a national brand in plastic at WalMart - forget the Cambodian virgins...
The food may certainly be fresher and better and healthier - but it's not cheaper.
And in the aggregate if I substituted cheap plastic bagged cereal, prepackaged frozen meals, and juice jugs for a farmers market / bulk store meal plan, my food budget would skyrocket.
If it really, truly cost less to go without plastic, poor people would do it, they do any and everything to save a dollar on food.
I was full of envy because by that time of year, New York, where I live, has mostly cabbage for greens. Your local farms had a variety of greens in season (meaning plentiful and cheap). I'm pretty sure I could eat cheaper in Houston than here.
We also went to a store called HEB with a huge bulk section. We filled bags we brought with us.
We ate delicious, healthy, nearly package-free at low cost.
I'm not sure what you tried, but I find experimenting for a week or two doesn't give enough experience to learn to cook from scratch fast and cheap. For example, learning to cook beans from dry in a pressure cooker is fast, simple, and very low cost. Here are reviews of my famous no-packaging vegetable stews that resulted from my experiments: http://joshuaspodek.com/food-world-reviews.
> If it really, truly cost less to go without plastic, poor people would do it, they do any and everything to save a dollar on food.
I suspect causality goes the other way, at least in part, that eating habits, prompted by poor education and predatory marketing, contributes to them being poor. As I understand it, your logic would suggest that poor people wouldn't drink alcohol, but I see lots of alcohol stores in poor neighborhoods.
I feel you've cornered me into at least trying an experiment here in the next month or so to "upgrade" my meal plan.
I'll do my best to catalog the process and results - maybe there'll be a guest blog on joshuaspodek.com soon ... :)
I find what leads people to change is community more than facts, figures, doom, gloom, etc.
I only lived in the UK and Hungary and both places sell stuff I mentioned. I'm very suprised to learn about the USA practices regarding this.
> If it really, truly cost less to go without plastic, poor people would do it, they do any and everything to save a dollar on food.
Then it seems like the problem is with the system indeed, if people are easy to motivate with savings. People try to save on food here too, that's why almost nobody buys the prepackaged meat from supermarkets (happens more in London where people are not that price sensitive).
Based on the quantity of meat I see in supermarkets in Hungary (not that much at all), I estimate 98% of the meat sales happen at butchers where you ask for a certain weight (let's say 2kgs of chicken breasts) and they put it into a thin plastic bag.
Very weird differences.
> And in the aggregate if I substituted cheap plastic bagged cereal, prepackaged frozen meals, and juice jugs for a farmers market / bulk store meal plan, my food budget would skyrocket.
Very sorry to hear about your frozen meal habit, I did that for a year and it took me about 5 years to recover from the weight gain and a general bad health state.
You have not asked for advice but perhaps you can try to make one dish meals in bulk using mostly cheaper ingredients like bulk rice & beans, cheaper veggies, eggs etc. It's generally much cheaper and healthier (again, we are in different contries, so YMMV).
Well, that equates to saying "poor people are not poor enough". I'm not saying you're wrong, but the only fix to "the system" is to make things a lot more expensive. If there were any substantial progress towards that, there would be riots and politician's heads on pikes.
Now, if there is a cheaper and more ecofriendly solution is available, then yes, I think the less ecofriendly version should be much more expensive as a penalty.
I think it's more about the effort that goes into it. If you look at what the op said, op travels to farmers markets, hits up bulk stores and butcher shops and generally puts effort into tracking down and sourcing out these things. For the op, it may well be cheaper, but it comes with a pretty large time sink(comparatively) and some amount of planning, I also wonder if op is factoring in travel time to their costs. It costs more to travel to a few different stores, both in gas or bus fare if these places are distant, plus in the time it takes to get around to these places. If someone has limited time and resources, in the end, it ends up being easier and more efficient to go to one store and spend the money on packaged foods than to make the trips op says.
This is from my own personal experience. I used to live pretty close to a butcher shop and a fresh produce and bulk place, the food quality was always better, the prices were better for what you got, you'd pay a lot more at the grocery store for the quality of meat you got from the butcher, but in the end I found myself going to the grocery store more often then not, just because it was easier after work or during the limited free time I had.
The most efficient thing to do might be to sit on your laptop all day and eat pop tarts or something. I'm only half joking.
But yeah, the answer might well not be as simple as "just do this one thing differently". It might even be a massive change. Whether that's a burden is in the eye of the beholder.
Essentially to use a christian term its cheap grace. Its easy for a kind person to be kind; but its hard for them to be stern when it is needed.
My parents moved there after I left (I visit once/yr), and that place is a literal swamp, and would not be so populous without the invention of AC.
>If it really, truly cost less to go without plastic, poor people would do it,
On what are you basing this statement? I don't use the plastic bags in the produce section, I just put produce directly in the cart (and wash them when i get home). Prepackaged food costs more because the manufacturers are "adding value." Try making potato or tortilla chips at home, and tell me it's not cheaper to pay $0.25-$0.60/oz ($4-$9.60/lb). Raw potatoes are $2/lb; cornmeal is even cheaper.
It's all about convenience. Convenience stores have the most ridiculous prices for almost everything, and they sell a lot; gas is the loss-leader with razor-thin margins.
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Sincerely,
Fruit and veg without plastic is available at your local supermarket.
It can be a bit annoying to weigh it - you can use reusable bags for that - an easy one would be that you can get at least 10 uses out of the clear plastic bags you take the stuff home in for example.
Processed stuff is harder sure. I tend to not really eat that stuff, staples are cheaper anyway.
I agree that most people don't do this - well over half of the supermarket is full of items I'd never even consider buying - but that doesn't change the fact they could.
I actually think there's a hump in the middle of the distribution.
Essential basic foods are cheap and generally come loose (or at least you'll get 15kg of rice in one big bag).
There are some exceptions like frozen vegetables.
Processed middle of budget stuff like pre made sauces, ready meals, pre packaged small cuts of meat etc - yeah that's full of packaging.
Then you have the signalling products whereby basically you're paying silly money for ready meals in cardboard boxes or whatever.