Zero Grocery Shopping Lifestyle
by Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller
Looking for a family challenge that can improve your connections with your food, your neighbors, and Mother Nature herself? Take a weekend, a week, a month, or more and try our Zero Grocery Shopping Lifestyle tips. You won’t be able to grow and harvest from your own container or garden in a weekend, but you can find a local community garden and sign yourself up for a plot. For immediate gratification, take a walk around your neighborhood or nearby park to forage for some tasty things for a Saturday night salad. Obviously, going grocery-shopping-free isn’t possible as a long-term lifestyle for many of us, but even as a short-term experiment, it can be eye-opening in the best way, connecting you with local, seasonal foods and the people in your community in fun and healthy new ways.
- Grow/farm your own: If you have the space, grow a garden of greens and whatever else you love. This is viable for people living in rural, suburban, and yes, urban areas. The organization Urban Farming is a modern incarnation of the Victory Gardens that produced 40% of the US food supply during WWII, an exciting movement to bring food production to city lots all over the United States. Even where there aren’t vacant city lots to devote to fruit and vegetables, there’s another grassroots movement at work turning parking strips into vegetable gardens. If you don’t have a backyard or parking strip to plant, find a community garden and sign up for a plot. Fresh eggs are nutritious and delicious, and even city dwellers can get chickens. We raise bees for the day when we can actually harvest our own supply of honey for the year; beekeeping is another option that also works for urban dwellers (and the pollination help from city bees is much appreciated by urban plants). Whatever ground you plant in, the more you grow, the fewer trips you have to make to the store.
- Forage: We know it sounds crazy, but if you can learn what the great free foragable edibles are around you, you can reduce your waste by buying less. We’re proud to admit that a good percentage of our diet is from foraged food: blackberries, apples (although the town just cut down our favorite beach apple tree), water cress, nettles, bitter cress, oyster mushrooms, huckleberries, blueberries, chanterelles, salmonberries. Cities have foraging options, too. Here’s an article about foraging in Washington, DC, a free PDF guide to urban foraging in Britain that also applies in general terms to North America, and First Ways is a blog guide to urban foraging written by a Portland, OR, USA resident.
- Make your own: If there’s something you eat regularly, try to make your own so you don’t have to purchase the packaging along with the staple item. We bake all our bread, make our yogurt, and toast our own nut mixes. It’s a way of life so it doesn’t feel like a chore and our home-made staples are much better than what we find at the store. Really. Don’t believe us? Check out our Food Less Plastic Pinterest board for some basic recipes for staples and treats that you can make at home. Sure, it does take time to cook at home, but that’s time you don’t have to spend navigating the aisles of your local grocery store and hauling the recyclable and landfill waste to your curb or dumpster. Buy in bulk and cook in bulk and you’ll free time up for enjoying what you’ve made with your family.
Please let us know if you give this a try – We’d love to hear what works for you, and what your local challenges are.