Adam's Low Impact Grocery Shopping

My first couple of attempts at grocery shopping under the oppressive law of the compact went fairly well. The first time, I went to get vegetables and fruit only. I went to a Metro in town intending to buy local as much as possible and try to avoid any stupid plastic on the vegetables. I was quite skeptical of being able to find any local vegetables or fruit, in January in Quebec.  After looking around for a while I realized there was actually a good bit of things grown locally (“In Quebec” the signs said, so that’s going to be ‘local’ enough for my purposes, for now). The cucumber, cabbage and romaine were grown in Quebec. Who would have known that some forward thinking person would have the good sense to grow vegetables in a cold as hell part of the world; good work comrades. Anyways, I also got some carrots from “The USA”, and a tomato from…I don’t remember. We’ll say Mexico, or wherever that’s not Canada or the States. Pleasantly, all of this delicious produce was wrapping and package free. Success! Sort of. I got to the cash and realized, like a douche, I left my re-useable sac in the car. I asked the cashier if I could just use the hand basket to bring it to the car and she told me no problem. As I was getting to the car somebody called me on my cell phone and I put the basket in the car as I was distracted, and just got in the car and drove away with their basket (we’re not buying ‘new’ stuff this year, so does stolen stuff count? Just kidding I brought it back).

The next round of groceries went considerably worse. I went with Hannah after her gym training, when she was very hungry, and she managed to convince me to buy a bunch of items on the grounds that ‘its recyclable packaging, Dad’. So, I suffered temporary brainwash at the hands of my seven year old daughter. I am a sucker. She convinced me to buy Lucky Charms cereal and boxes of crackers, as well as nestle quick syrup and frozen concentrate juice (who the hell knew – other than Erin – that those were not completely recyclable?). So when I got home a large majority of my shopping was vetoed. I agreed to return the cereal and crackers, due to the plastic wrap they are in, inside the boxes, but could not return the juice and the syrup for the shame I would have suffered returning 90% of a grocery trip’s items. Note to self: child will trick you, keep on your toes.

Hopefully I will learn from my frightfully disgraceful second attempt at groceries.

Score 1 out of 2.

Adam