Sometimes, commonsense appears to have left the building - especially if that building houses a supermarket. So much of what's offered for sale is pointless, packaged up for alleged convenience but really only adding up to a mountain range of waste.
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Sure, the single use plastic bag has checked out from the checkout but lurking not far away is the fruit and vegetable section, where plastic abounds for no discernible reason.
Take mushrooms.
There they are loosely arranged in a cardboard box - Swiss browns, white cups, flat fields in all their wholesome glory. Convenient alongside them brown paper bags, supplied because they're the best way to store mushies and prevent them sweating.
All good until ...
You find the same mushrooms, sliced and packed in a plastic punnet, parceled up in cling wrap. Two pointless uses of plastic for what? To save perhaps three minutes of slicing time at home.
And over there ... the capsicums, shiny and pert in red, green and yellow. Loose if you want but also parceled up in threes on a styrofoam tray, again wrapped in plastic.
Cast your eyes over the whole section and there's plastic everywhere. It manages mint, suffocates spinach, restrains radicchio. And it's all utterly pointless. We've been conditioned to think it's somehow more hygeinic, more convenient but the reality is it's burying the planet in rubbish.
You can argue the packaging is justified in the meat section because no one wants to imagine unwashed hands seasoning the sirloin with streptococci. At least in your actual butcher shop, however, you are burdened with only one plastic bag per item and no styrofoam tray.
Perhaps the most ridiculous "innovation" of recent years is the coffee pod - a wasteful single-use contraption that produces a mediocre brew at best and tonnes of landfill at worst. And it saves us what exactly? Getting coffee grounds on our delicate little fingers?
And speaking of brews, it turns out the "upmarket" plastic tea bag is actually poisoning us. Each one sheds millions of micro plastic straight into the tea, which we then ingest. That premium brand orange pekoe that seemed like a great idea at the time now looks decidedly dodgy.
As consumers we need to take back control. Buy the loose vegetables, real coffee, tea leaves instead of bags, fill the string bag with goodness not rubbish.
