Paper, Plastic, Cloth, eh.
My brother-in-law Matthew suggests (or at least quotes people who suggest) in his latest Seattle Times article that what you put in your grocery bag matters more than which bag you choose. He advocates more vegetables and less meat, although he is no vegetarian.
I agree with this, but still try to use the cloth bags. I have a lot of them. My problem is that I forget about them. I don’t put them in the car, or I even forget that they are in the car and don’t take them inside.
I also tend to use them to carry or even store other items, so that they are not available for grocery use. Right now, for instance, I have at least two Fred Meyer bags full of Girl Scout craft supplies.
Tonight I finally remembered to use a cloth bag. I found one bag in the car when I arrived at the store, and took it in with me, fully expecting that I would also need to use plastic bags. I wasn’t buying that much, but I had enough to probably fill three plastic bags. Luckily for me, I got a great cashier, who fitted everything into that one cloth bag.
Will I make it a habit? We’ll see.
This post has 6 comments
September 29th, 2008
Well, it’s not that the bag doesn’t matter–it’s that people seem to be focusing on the bag discussion and ignoring the “what’s inside” discussion.
I’m good about taking cloth bags with me when I leave the house to go to the store, but I don’t always have one with me for unplanned stops. I want a couple of those scrunchable cloth bags (with little pouches) that I can keep in the bottom of my bag to be handy at all times.
September 29th, 2008
I love the cloth bags. And I try to buy veggies without plastic bags too.
When I’m done with the bag in the house, I hang it over the doorknob so I see it on my way out of the house. They’re nice in that you can fold them up. I keep mine between my seat and my console, so I don’t forget.
September 29th, 2008
I think I’ve seen those at Target, Laurie (where you probably don’t go all that often).
Pan, I still haven’t figured that one out — what do you do with your veggies? Bring an extra bag just for them? Even at the farmers market I generally use the plastic bags, so I can keep everything separate. Maybe I should grab some old t-shirts or something and sew up a few bags.
September 29th, 2008
We are pretty good about keeping our cloth bags in the trunk- as soon as we unpack food, the bags go back in the car. What this leads to (every time!) at the grocery store is one of us madly dashing to the car whilst the cashier is ringing up the order. Winco gives us some token amount off of our groceries if we bring our own bags.
September 29th, 2008
I just don’t worry about keeping the vegetables separate, I guess–the only time I can think of that I use a plastic bag for veg is if I’m buying green beans, and that’s only because most of my bags have a wide mesh (I happen to know that you have one of these!). The farmers at the market never object to weighing things in my bags; sometimes they take a little off the weight because of it, but I don’t really think it adds significant weight.
It took a while, but we are finally in the habit of always taking bags to the grocery store. It’s like, “got wallet? got bags? let’s go.” We need a certain number of plastic grocery bags for making tortillas–as Laurie knows, we haven’t found anything else that works nearly as well to cover the tortilla press–but the occasional times when all our stuff doesn’t fit into the cloth/mesh bags covers that.
This is possibly a “you’re the only one that self-centered, Wendy” thing, but one thing that helps me remember bags is that people tell me all the time how much they like the ones I made, and I enjoy hearing it.
September 29th, 2008
I’m really looking forward to the bag tax taking effect in Seattle, and really annoyed with the plastic bag industry for delaying it. Really, I think the paper/plastic/reusable question is going to be moot in a few years in much of the US, the way it already it is Ireland.