Not my bag

Waste not, shop not

• Chris Jeavans
• 5 Aug 08, 11:26 AM GMT

An interesting side effect of giving up new plastic is that, so far, I am wasting less food.

This is because I, like the majority of the human race, am inherently lazy and if I can foresee that something is going to cause me extra effort, I will avoid it.

So when I was staring at the contents of the fridge last night - half an onion, half an aubergine going puckered at the edges, the last remaining pack of plastic-wrapped chicken - I made sure that I used them all up in a curry.

Not that I would have deliberately wasted them in the past (especially not the chicken) but I may well have ended up neglecting the veg for so long that they became unusable.

But now the difficulties of plastic-free shopping are foremost in my mind. Waste food? No chance, that means having to find some more.

In fact, I went one stage further and deliberately bulked up the curry with chickpeas and some spinach (from a kindly colleague's veg patch) so that I could take another portion to work for lunch and freeze the rest.

This is hardly breaking news - I'm sure Stone Age woman thought "That deer and bilberry stew will do another day" - but the point is that while I have always known this was a sensible thing to do, I haven't actually done it. Until now.

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