Thinking Outside The Bag

I am a huge fan of using reusable bags (generally referred to as canvas bags regardless of what they are made from). And they are great to use instead of paper or plastic bags at the store. But everything else is still packaged in some for of cardboard and/or plastic. Our latest trip to Whole Foods forced us to be a bit more creative with our choices.

Whole Foods has the great option of buying things in bulk. Unfortunately they have plastic bags by their bins to fill with your choices. After sending a few emails to them I got the green light to bring in various containers to fill that we could empty and bring back. The bulk items tend to be a bit cheaper too. 

My girlfriend and I are big fans of nut butter. Whole Foods has a peanut butter grinder and an almond butter grinder. We brought two old jars from home, got them weighed for tare, and then filled them up.

The almond butter is in the peanut butter jar, go figure

We can bring them back again and again as we use them.

Next we bought a few of their reusable muslin bags (as we only had two) and filled one with granola:

And one with fig bars:

We also had a large glass jar that I’m not sure where it came from. We filled it with organic walnuts.

We make our own bread and they have all of the ingredients we need except for yeast (they may have it and we just didn’t see it).

This marks a huge step away from generating any trash or recycling for us. Eventually we would like to step even farther away from things with packaging.

Note: “Thinking outside the bag,” is a phrase used in the movie Bag it. I borrowed it because it seemed perfect for this post title.