Treading Lightly is a blog series on ways to lighten our carbon footprint.
So in 2022, I wrote a Treading Lightly post about cheese. Recently I realized that one of the photos in that post needs an update. It’s this one:
Still grating my own cheese and loving it, but I no longer keep it in plastic. I am working to eliminate as much plastic as possible from my life. Single-use plastic for sure. I recycle as much packaging as possible and I prefer to buy products that aren’t packaged in plastic (or made from plastic).
Regarding this obsolete photo, I have also been ditching things like my massive collection of Tupperware, some of which is pictured here. I did not do this lightly! I spent years and a ton of money building a Tupperware collection that served my every need. I was even a Tupperware sales person for a while. (That didn’t last long; not my scene.)
Recently, with growing awareness about the health problems caused by microplastics, I began to want to minimize my physical contact with plastics. Does Tupperware shed microplastics into the food it contains? Does it shed them into the water that’s used to wash it? Into the food that’s (Ghu forbid) cooked in it? I have my suspicions, and I’m definitely more comfortable storing my food in glass.
Enter my new collection of glass jars. It took a while to move everything out of the Tupperware or the original plastic packaging and into this array of canning jars. I love them! I can see the contents better, and they have this lovely gleaming glass aesthetic going on. Shiny, kinda old-fashioned and homey.
For stuff that I’d been keeping in its original plastic packaging, I discovered that not only could I see it better, the jars are more efficient for storage than the plastic bags. Case in point: brown sugar.
Stored in the “resealable” plastic bag, my brown sugar would always dry out. Even if I cleaned all the sugar out of the seal, and then folded it down and clamped it shut with a binder clip, it dried out. I tried adding a little clay thing that you soak in water, no go. The sugar dried out. As soon as I put it in a glass jar, it stayed moist without any fuss.
Even better, it’s easier to get stuff out of the jars without spilling it than to get it out of plastic packages. That brown sugar, when I tried spooning it out of the plastic bag, would end up all over the counter. With the jar, I spoon it out and rarely lose a grain.
That goes for the cheese, too. Here’s the updated photo:
The cheese looks prettier in this glass! (The cheddar is white cheddar, btw.) The jars are easier to open and close. Measuring from them is a breeze. They fill the shelves more efficiently. And they cost a fraction of what Tupperware costs.
I absolutely love keeping my staples in glass.
Give it a try! At least for the brown sugar – you will love that.