{"id":4082,"date":"2025-06-23T02:00:55","date_gmt":"2025-06-23T10:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/?p=4082"},"modified":"2025-06-20T19:33:53","modified_gmt":"2025-06-21T03:33:53","slug":"treading-lightly-glass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2025\/06\/23\/treading-lightly-glass\/","title":{"rendered":"Treading Lightly &#8211; Glass"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Treading Lightly is a blog series on ways to lighten our carbon footprint.<\/em><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/patinagle.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/grate-your-own02.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-998\" src=\"https:\/\/patinagle.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/grate-your-own02-241x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"241\" height=\"300\" \/><\/a>So in 2022, I wrote a Treading Lightly post about <a href=\"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2022\/08\/26\/treading-lightly-grate-your-own\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">cheese<\/a>. Recently I realized that one of the photos in that post needs an update. It&#8217;s this one:<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t packaged in plastic (or made from plastic).<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t last long; not my scene.)<\/p>\n<p>Recently, with growing awareness about the health problems caused by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.unep.org\/news-and-stories\/story\/everything-you-should-know-about-microplastics\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">microplastics<\/a>, I began to want to minimize my physical contact with plastics. <a href=\"https:\/\/microplasticfreefuture.com\/blog\/tupperware-and-microplastics-what-every-consumer-should-know\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Does Tupperware shed microplastics into the food it contains?<\/a> Does it shed them into the water that&#8217;s used to wash it? <a href=\"https:\/\/www.prevention.com\/food-nutrition\/a20491647\/is-it-safe-to-cook-foods-packaged-in-plastic\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Into the food that&#8217;s (Ghu forbid) cooked in it?<\/a> I have my suspicions, and I&#8217;m definitely more comfortable storing my food in glass.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/patinagle.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/pantry-shelves-cropped.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-1033\" src=\"https:\/\/patinagle.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/pantry-shelves-cropped-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" \/><\/a>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 <em>love<\/em> them! I can see the contents better, and they have this lovely gleaming glass aesthetic going on. Shiny, kinda old-fashioned and homey.<\/p>\n<p>For stuff that I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Stored in the &#8220;resealable&#8221; 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.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/patinagle.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/cheese-jars-cropped-scaled.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1035\" src=\"https:\/\/patinagle.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/cheese-jars-cropped-255x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"255\" height=\"300\" \/><\/a>Even better, it&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>That goes for the cheese, too. Here&#8217;s the updated photo:<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>I absolutely love keeping my staples in glass.<\/p>\n<p>Give it a try! At least for the brown sugar &#8211; you will <em>love<\/em> that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s this one: Still grating my own cheese and loving it, but I no longer keep it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[406,56],"tags":[51],"class_list":["post-4082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-life-experiences","tag-treading-lightly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4082"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4088,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4082\/revisions\/4088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}