Going Bananas

On my continued voyage to try to be kinder to the planet and cut down/out on plastics, I went to the supermarket to do the food shopping. So what, you may ask. Well, wearing the goggles of discernment proved to be quite an experience. I was very proud of myself that I remembered to bring my reading glasses. Usually I do a lot of trombone work, squinting at minute text. Instead, I did a lot of dithering. Let’s see: I chose to buy passata in a tetra pak carton as I thought it could be recycled, only to find out when I got it home that it could not, because it was made of mixed materials. Oops. Then there were the bananas. The ones I wanted were the Fairtrade organic ones but they were in a plastic bag. Then there were Rainforest Alliance bananas, not in a bag, but not organic either. How is Rainforest Alliance different from Fairtrade? My head started to melt. I spent so long dithering over various ethical options that in the end it was nature itself that got me out of there. The call of nature, to be precise. God bless the Middle Aged Bladder is all I can say, or I would still be there, with my brain in a puddle on the floor. I just about had time to whip the scissors out of my pocket at the packing counter, and painstakingly remove the plastic wrap on a cucumber (get a life, Angela Merkel and your feckin’ EU Directives on Cucumber Wrappings) and leave the wrap, along with the Fairtrade plastic bag (someone not thinking about the planet there, methinks) – and leg it out to the nearest loo. My Ethical Shopping crusade is like myself, a work in progress.