wrapper nation

Have you ever taken a look at the amount of wrapping we do? Buy some Orowheat bread at Costco and you will find not one but three wrappings. First there is the big bag, and because it carries the bar code that the cashier needs, you cannot leave it behind. In it you stuff two loaves, each wrapped in another bag. Then inside that bag, there is a shrink-wrap type plastic sheet that surrounds the bread itself. I am done buying Orowheat. 

I am not sure why bread gets wrapped in the first place. It is not as if nobody touches the loaf. If you do not want to eat a loaf that others touched, you better not eat bread. When I was a kid we would go to the bakery and buy bread. It was always handed to us bare-handed, no bag or anything. These days people insist bakery shop workers wear latex exam gloves to handle bread. Our local baker would have fallen over laughing at such idiocy. If you really thought he never touched the bread, you must be from Mars.

We carried our bread, all exposed in a little net-like shopping bag that was reused until it literally fell apart. Years later "progress" appeared and the bakery acquired a bread slicer. Now they had to bag the bread lest if fall apart. Today, nearly all bread is pre-sliced. It is a bad idea really as the bread spoils faster, is easier to consume, and deprives people of some much needed exercise. The industrial bakeries think it is all improvement. The more bread gets eaten or spoils, the more they can sell.

Wrapping and bagging has become so second-nature, one has to be super-aware when shopping. It is not enough to bring your own shopping bags. Plastic baggies are everywhere. Veggies are all individually bagged, otherwise the check stand people get confused. There is also no way to keep items like apples together on the roller band they have, plus it annoys the checkout folks if your oranges roll away.

If you really want to save on packaging, I recommend that you use the self-checkout stands that are now popping up everywhere. Here you can actually place bananas and apples on the scale yourself, and then pop them in your re-usable bag, without ever needing one of those plastic baggies that nobody can do without.

Check stand people have other bad habits. I am sure management contributes to these because so many of them seem to do it almost without thinking.  They routinely put meat -which is already packaged in styrofoam with plastic top- in a little plastic bag, and some even put ice-cream containers in plastic before they add it to your shopping bag. Bagamania at the supermarket. One more reason to avoid supermarkets whenever you can.

In my experience only the folks at Whole Foods seem to care and are responsive and attentive to less bagging. At other stores, one frequently has to fight personnel to stop crazy wrapping. At the very least you get dirty looks for being a non-conformist.