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Sustainable Grocery Shopping (ENG)

The area of daily sustainability that we will address this week is grocery shopping. Every purchase we make is somehow an investment, which creates demand. But are we really sure that when we go grocery shopping our actions are well thought out investments and they're not automatic habits which we give little consideration to?

Let's consider 5 ways to make grocery shopping more sustainable.




#1 Only buying what's on the list

As we've already said when we talked about food waste, the best way to minimise waste is to only buy what you actually need, sticking to a list that needs to be prepared according to a weekly menu (which can be more or less structured but has to exist!). 



#2 Bringing your own shopping bag

If you have some old shopping bags, you can bring those, or you can bring a couple of the 50 tote bags that are typically laying around the house.



#3 Bringing your own fruit & vegetable bag, too!

You can buy reusable cotton bags made especially for fruit and vegetables, or you can simply keep the paper ones you take at the supermarket or greengrocer and keep on using them, covering the old labels with the new ones. Before they get so ruined you can't use them anymore, you'll already have covered a great number of shopping trips.



#4 Buying in bulk

Buying in bulk makes it possible to avoid plastic packaging. Some supermarkets sell everything in bulk, while many others sell some products in bulk, typically seeds, legumes and grains.

That being said, almost any supermarket gives us the choice between buying pre-packaged fruit and vegetables (particularly, those ready to consume, like pre-packaged salad) or buying them loose. Make the right choice!



#5 Paying attention to the origin of the items you buy

We need to make compromises: giving up on coffee or chocolate because they come from far away would probably be asking way too much, but we should get used to checking the origin of what we buy and prefer the items that come from places that are closer to home. There's a big difference between buying an avocado that comes from Mexico and buying one that comes from Spain (even better, you can now buy avocados that come from Sicily!) for instance, and they're often both sold at the same location.

If you're not presented with the choice of buying an ingredient that comes from a place that's closer to home, you should at least be aware of what you're doing: buying avocados or bananas is not the end of the world, but it's not sustainable for them to be at the centre of our diet. It's not sustainable for our daily January breakfast to be made of bananas, blueberries, strawberries, mangoes and pineapples and our lunch of courgettes and tomatoes. This doesn't mean that we should never eat those ingredients; it just means that we ought to be aware of what's implied in what we're consuming and try to make it the exception and not the rule.

Obviously, all this applies to those who already reduce their consumption of animal products, which pollute much more than the transportation of fruit and vegetables. If you are approaching a plant-based diet and the only way to make the transition easier is to eat more avocados and bananas, don't be too hard on yourself. It's a matter of priorities!


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