Chiswick Couple Make Plastic-Free Pledge

And find it is possible to buy food and drink locally, without the packaging

How hard can it be to buy plastic-free food and drink in Chiswick? Tracey Logan has been consuming nothing else for two weeks and is finding it (almost) too easy.

Tracey and husband Richard Szwagrzak

Some give up chocolate for Lent, others sugar in tea. But after watching Blue Planet and seeing the long-term environmental harm caused by our addiction to plastic packaging, my husband and I decided to give up plastic-packaged food and drink. I know… tricky! But we had the string bags and daily glass-bottled delivery from Milk and More, so how hard could it be?

I confess, we had got used to plastic profligacy and weekly filled our LBH Plastics recycling box with fizzy drink bottles, yoghurt tubs, take-away curry containers and those mysterious plastic covers they put on pre-packaged pears. But two weeks into our fast and there’s just an old yoghurt pot from our former lives and an empty bleach bottle.

To achieve our goal we have been forced to rely less on the big chains (M&S, Waitrose, Tesco and Sainsbury’s) and more on Chiswick’s many small shops and stalls. Our shopping has been cheaper, too, since we only buy what we want instead of packs of four or six of things. So what has been easy and what has been hard? Here are my personal favourites. You will have your own:

Meat and deli-items: Mackens in Turnham Green Terrace will wrap your fresh meat in waxed paper, and across the road Bayley and Sage will do the same with cooked meats and cheeses. Their plastic carrier bags are also recyclable.

Fruit & Veg: Chiswick High Road’s two greengrocery stalls, Bakers (Windmill Road) and Collins (Holly Lane), sell most things loose in brown paper bags. The best thing about shopping this way is that it reminds you of what’s in season (e.g. quince and blood oranges recently), which doesn’t always happen in the supermarket. We haven’t yet found a local source of unwrapped Pak Choi or bean sprouts, so have made our stir fries with Savoy Cabbage (minus the tough stems) and strips of red pepper with toasted cashew nuts. Scrummy!

We haven’t located long cucumbers without plastic wrapping, but you can get tastier, shorter and fatter ones on the high street stalls. These are perfect chopped with capers and Carluccio’s lemon oil for a side salad with grilled tuna. Lemon and Limes on Turnham Green Terrace deserve a special ‘greengrocery’ commendation for their long opening hours (Mon-Sat: 8am-9pm, Sun: 8am-8pm) and also their recyclable plastic carriers.

Cakes: This one’s easy as most local bakeries / patisseries serve their cakes, croissants and breads in paper bags or boxes.

Major challenges overcome (or high-class problems solved):

Mozzarella – in Chiswick it is possible to complete your insalata tricolore without plastic packaging by visiting The Italians, who serve it loose in the traditional way. You have to ask, but they obligingly found a cardboard carton for us and covered it in brown paper.

Spaghetti – we had a dinner party coming up and didn’t have time to make it ourselves. We failed to find the lovely old-fashioned (and very long) paper-packaged dry kind but The Italians had a shorter, paper-wrapped version with just a small plastic window, which was the best we could find locally.

Nuts, dried fruit and rice – from this week, Chiswick has been blessed with a new dried foods store, The Source Bulk Foods which sells all of the above and much more in brown paper bags. We really thought we were about to be defeated by rice. Not now though!

Yoghurt – As Nature Intended sell River Cottage live yoghurt in plain and vanilla, which comes in glass jars. You can use this (or other live yoghurts) to make your own radiator yoghurt, as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall demonstrates on YouTube. The shop also sells another, stronger tasting, fermented milk product called Kefir, which comes in glass bottles and is middle-eastern. As Nature Intended sells the culture for making your own Kefir, though we haven’t finished our first jar of it yet.

Pleasant Surprises

Awkwardness at the counter… we were nervous about the reaction we’d face in shops when insisting on food wrapped without plastic – or nothing at all. But there has been hardly any of that. Instead we have been pleasantly surprised at the willingness of Chiswick’s local shopkeepers to adapt to our needs. And complete strangers in the queue behind us have not tutted; some have even shared their own efforts to cut plastic consumption. At the Waitrose deli-counter, a shop assistant went to the bakery to get paper wrapping for our ham, which showed heartwarming initiative. While we waited for her return a fellow shopper, a company director, told me that he had banned plastic cups at the water cooler and was insisting on paper instead.

Think Globally, Act Locally.

We initially gave up plastic food and drink packaging for Lent, but know we will keep it going after that because Chiswick’s small shops and stalls make it relatively easy. We know our little campaign is a drop in the plastic-polluted ocean. But we recall the saying of a former parish priest of Our Lady of Grace and St Edwards, Monsignor Jim Curry, that: ‘if you think you’re too small to make a difference, remember the last night you spent in a bedroom with a mosquito!’

Postscript:

t is now possible to buy fresh fish, meat and deli foods from Waitrose and have it packed in our own (clean) containers, instead of their plastic wrapping. This wasn’t possible a month ago. In response to my complaint, I received the following e-mail last week from Waitrose Customer Service:

‘I'm pleased to let you know that our Branch Partners may now accept customers' own clean lidded containers to take home products from service counters (excluding Hot Food). However to reduce the food safety and hygiene risk potentially created by the containers, certain precautions will need to be taken by the Partners on the counters.’

This morning boughtI some lovely hand-carved ham and a triangle of Cornish ‘brie’ from the Chiswick Waitrose deli counter and they put it in my Pyrex dishes. No ifs, no buts, it couldn’t have been simpler.

March 20, 2018