Freewrite -Day 13

3 Unique Reasons Why I Unpackage All Groceries The Moment I Return Home

Another thing you might auto-pilot that might actually be a good mindful activity to do

Grocery shopping is such an integral and ordinary chore of life that we rarely think about the process. It seems simple — you get there; you buy the stuff; you get home; you consume the stuff.

Maybe the only tip you’ve gotten about grocery shopping you’ve gotten is to make a list.

But what happens after you grocery shop? Do you have a specific habit?

For me, I started unpackaging all the non-perishable packaging from my groceries and supplies the moment I got home.

Quite surprisingly, from such a mundane habit, I’ve learned so much about my environmental impact and my eating habits.

Let’s Get the Obvious Reason Out of the Way: Decreasing Clutter

The most obvious reason to unpackage groceries is to decrease the amount of clutter.

You’ve probably done a smaller scale of this, unpackaging frozen foods from their box and storing only the bag of food. It’s much easier to Tetris, and if you need to keep the cooking instructions, you can just snap a photo for later.

Although I don’t go as far as Marie Kondo’s suggestions as to remove sticker labels, I remove immediate boxes, films and wraps wherever I can, especially if it’s not there to maintain freshness.

But you probably guessed this reason. What could my two other reasons possibly be?

The Immediate Litter Audit

When you batch this action of removing unnecessary packaging immediately rather than only when you need the item, you get a tangible visual of exactly what your shopping waste looks like.

A pile.

You get an immediate visual experience of just how much waste there is that’s superfluous in your shopping choices.

This visual really changed how I started shopping afterwards, factoring in packaging options that might have more recyclable or reusable components.

Injecting Ingredient Mindfulness

Do you ever run into the issue of accidentally picking an ingredient up at the grocery store on the way home just to realize you already have six other cans tucked away in miscellaneous spots?

Do you ever forget to eat something and by the time you realized you had purchased it, it’s gone bad? (I had this issue particularly with vegetables and fruits, and especially with avocados. I swear, they’re ripe for exactly 22 seconds and then they’re overripe and rotten.)

I found that adding this extra step of reviewing the trash I was generating also helped me slow down and become more aware of exactly what was going into the fridge. Sometimes, this looked like cutting up the mesh that my tangerines came in so that I had to manually fill up the fruit bowl I have in the fridge.

This slowed down ritual shifted my post-grocery routine to something on auto-pilot (“the shove everything inside” technique) to something more deliberate, methodological.

And deliberate and methodological is the best way to Tetris your fridge and pantry.

The One Caveat

The one caveat to this entire process is that I keep perishable items in packaging that keeps it fresh. So while I remove the mesh that tangerines often come in (because that’s mostly to keep it together), I don’t take raspberries out of their plastic container for another box. I know quite a few people who batch wash their fruit ahead of time when transferring fruit into reusable containers, but I don’t because I rely on that sweet sweet preservative action to keep my fruit from rotting.

Maybe I’ll eventually enter a season of my life where I don’t have to make this slightly gross decision (I still wash the preservatives off, I swear!) and can fresher produce in smaller quantities, more frequently. But at this moment, bulk buying is my friend and bulk buying alone means eating that same food for a long long time.

Somehow, I Found Lessons in Mundane Chores

In the end, somehow, I realized that a slight change in my habit helped me reflect on my choices more often.

It helped declutter, but also helped me examine just how much unnecessary landfill clutter there was in the first place, and also audit what I already had as ingredients to work with.

I think that’s a curious thing about habits. You might start it for one reason, but realize that it impacts your life in many other ways, but you don’t get to unearth these serendipitous moments until then.

So maybe, just maybe, if you have a habit that you were curious about trying, trying it out! Even if from other people’s stories, it doesn’t seem to do much. Maybe, for you, in this specific context, it could have more benefits for you than someone else.

It’s all in the experimenting.

Author Bio: Hi I’m Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) and I try to find beauty and curiosity in the mundane. Ps, you can listen to this and other poems re-imagined in podcast form!

Hop down the rabbit hole? 🐰🕳

^ by Sruthi Korlakunta