Wonder where your old jeans got to?
They might be wrapping my dinner.
We’ve been testing out services for delivery of ingredients and meals. A new one, Freshly, offers freshly cooked meals that just need to be warmed up.
All their meals are gluten-free, no processed sugars, high protein, low carb. And they do really taste good, based on the few I’ve had.
But I’m not here to talk about the taste. Today I’m thinking about what it takes to get those tasty meals to us.
The packaging has to be substantial in order to keep the food cold during shipping. The services we’ve tried use ice packs made from plastic bags filled with a water-based gel, so you can just thaw them, flush the gel and recycle the bags.
To insulate the boxes, PeachDish uses a filler of jute that can be composted. Since there’s no compost heap at the condo, I’ve draped that over the patio railing to see if any neighborhood critters would make use of it for a nest lining. So far, no takers.
Freshly uses recyclable plastic bags that are filled with shredded denim – the wooly stuff pictured above in the featured image.
Because it’s cotton, you can throw it into landfill without feeling guilty – it’s biodegradable.
The big cardboard shipping boxes can be recycled, of course. So there isn’t too much waste from the bulk of the packaging.
But there also are the little synthetic mesh bags for the ingredients – which I save because I think there must be something I can re-use them for. There are small plastic bags and occasionally cans for some other ingredients, and for prepared meals there’s the plastic containers and their shrink wrap.
All in all, it’s a lot of packaging for a couple of meals.
It makes me feel wasteful, in addition to being lazy for not cooking. And I still feel overwhelmed by the need for healthy food.
We went shopping today – Tom’s first outing to the grocery store since July – and bought a lot of fresh food, along with a stack of frozen dinners. Hope they taste good.
At least the packaging will be less than having it shipped to us.
Today’s penny is a 1995, the 50th anniversary of the year that the first frozen meals were manufactured. Called “Strato Plates,” they were made for military and commercial flights, according to the Library of Congress.