Become a PLASTICTARIAN too!
It all started with an item on Jeugdjournaal (a children’s news programme) about a ten-year-old boy who had come up with a plan to reduce the unnecessary consumption of disposable plastic. His idea was both simple and effective: just stop eating or drinking anything packaged in disposable plastic, and give yourself the title of plastictarian. By doing so, you’ll be helping to prevent the creation of even more plastic soup, and directly contributing to a better world. My daughter Lotus was sold on this idea immediately.
Following Lotus’s lead, our whole family decided to become plastictarians, but we soon found out it wasn’t that simple. For example, how do you carry loose apples, or a freshly sliced loaf of bread? The solution to the first problem came in the form of nylon string bags with a drawstring (the same type of bags you can wash lingerie in). They were great for buying loose fruit or bread rolls, eliminating the need for disposable plastic bags. When it came to bread, we went a step further and bought cotton bread bags for a euro from a Dutch supermarket, so that we could smugly have our sliced bread packaged in them.
However, that almost went horribly wrong the other day.
With my beautiful ecru bread bag in hand, I proudly went off to the supermarket bread counter to buy a thick-sliced loaf of spelt bread. As it turned out, the girl behind the bread counter had not yet heard about these bags. She cut the bread and printed out the price label to stick it on, but where? I said that she could stick it on the cotton bag, and her colleague mumbled something to that effect too. She probably didn’t hear or understand us, however, because she grabbed a new, empty plastic bag and went to put the label on it. Just in time I called out, ‘Noooo, no plastic! I’m trying to become a plastictarian!’ She’d never heard of that before, since not everyone watches 10-year-old plastictarians on Jeugdjournaal. But perhaps we should do that more often…