Can Eating Single Ready Meals Be Eco-Friendly?
Can you have an eco friendly house if you eat alone?
People are not solitary creatures by nature, yet busy schedules and the demands of the career ladder can sometimes make it easier to just go it alone.
If you want to impress the boss or just earn more money you could well find yourself working such unsociable hours that you end up eating take-away foods or easy-cook meals that we all know are no good for your health – let alone the planet. But can you stop it?
Apparently, people living alone use 42 % more packaging than multi-human households; they also produce an estimated half a tonne of extra waste per year as well.
Now, many of these such figures can be explained away by ‘economical’ choices, but others are a bit harder to ignore.
By living an economic life, these singles may well only be purchasing the actual amount of food that they need, rather than larger pack-sizes or jumbo containers of food and drink, ultimately creating more packaging per unit. However due to erratic and unpredictable hours, they may well be forced to buy products from more convenient stores that offer only a limited range and at a greater cost.
Lets look at these in turn.
More Packaging:
Generally I would call this the ‘easy packed lunch’ mentality that many busy or less imaginative parents resort to. I mean why cut a large lump of deli cheese into chunks yourself and put them in a lunch box for half the price and about a tenth of the packaging waste when you could by a pack of ready-made bite-size pieces of ‘cheese’ that are all individually wrapped for freshness?
Why not make your own sandwich for lunch rather than buy one that costs the same as 2 whole loafs of bread? Why pay more for a 500ml bottle of branded ‘pop’ at the front of the store than for a whole 2 liter bottle of the same drink further in-store? It doesn’t make sense!
It seems that some peoples choices are too much about themselves with no consideration for the consequences.
All the extra waste we produce will require more time, money and man-power to process – but why should we spend money on clearing up all this seemingly unnecessary mess? We could be forwarding that money into much needed projects like improving public transport, offering local businesses incentives and taking care of our children and more elderly members of the community.
Local councils are having their financial decisions made for them by the mess people make rather than being able to decide on what the community would actually benefit from themselves. And then we wonder why our Council Tax and Rates go up?
Extra Waste:
Obviously the more packaged items you consume – the more waste you will create – but some people’s hands are tied.
Take the example of someone who lives close to work so they don’t need to drive in everyday. However, the only shop on their way home is a tiny petrol station ‘express store’. It rarely has any fresh food by the time they stroll in on their way home, and the product lines it holds have been selected for a reason that suits their business needs more than their customers needs.
Yes, they have essentials like bread and milk, but everything else is in easy-to-carry-home size and meals-for-1-size – the forced mainstay of any busy person. They hold hardly any of the products that you would normally buy from a larger store, and of course hold no bulk items at all. They don’t have any ‘value’ products either.
‘Convenience’ Stores:
Now, working in retail, I can see why they have chosen to fill their tiny understaffed store with the products they have, but it is no good for an eco-shopper or someone trying to save money – or even someone trying to be healthy for that matter!
The irony is of course that if you drive or catch the bus to the nearest larger store once a week (on one of your only days off that week) you may well get all the products you needed, but at the cost of the travel there and back. You will also be likely to buy more food than you actually need – just to be sure you had enough to last the week and to make the journey worth while. Ultimately, this causes more food to be wasted as it goes out of date – but also more packing is thrown out as you brought more things than you actually needed to.
As you can imagine the results are somewhat skewed and neither seems a very good option. But like so many people living and working alone – you almost have little choice in how you shop. Only by seriously putting yourself out can you maintain some sort of eco-friendly house keeping behaviour, and I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t know where to start.
If you are trying to be a wiser shopper, then here are a few simple steps that you can take to get you started without too much effort:
Keep Supplies:
Always have a supply of basic foods that have a long shelf life and don’t take long to cook so you will always have a dinner when you get home. This will no doubt save you time and money as it reduces the chances of you having to impulse buy. Examples would include frozen vegetables and hearty pies, tins of soup with part-baked rolls or quick-cook pasta with tinned tuna, and selection of dried herbs and sauces.
Plan Ahead:
If you were able to plan what you were going to eat for the next few days or a whole week even, when you went shopping you would only buy what you needed. You would make sure that you used the foods in date order making better use of your fresh foods – and you will make more economical use of all the foods that you brought, reducing your waste as a result. Ideally you need more regular hours to make this 100% effective.
Freeze Your Own:
If you planned your shopping around your day off, you could take the time to make a big pan of chunky soup, a curry, a pasta dish or chilli con carne with fresh ingredients. You could then divide them down into your tummy-sized portions and freeze them. This way you won’t need to buy just one-person sized amounts of everything, you can buy bulk!
You will create your own healthy ready meals exactly to your taste – and they only take a few minutes to microwave back to life!
Bake A Cake:
Why not take the time to bake a fruit loaf, make a fridge-cake or create your own oat flapjacks? You can then cut off a slice of your choice everyday for your lunch box. This way, you won’t be tempted to buy chocolates and other sweet over-priced snacks when working in town as you would have a piece of your very own healthy and unpackaged version to munch away on!
Remember – The tiny things all add up, so there is no need to change your lifestyle overnight.
Let it change in manageable and achievable stages. Even if you only make your own lunch 3 times a week, or plan your meals on your days off – it all counts.