A Sustainable Lunch is a Happy Lunch: Seven Tips For Success

A simple and unfortunate fact is: lunch is one of the most wasteful times of the day. Between fast food cartons, microwave meals in loads of pre-packaging, and a proliferation of disposable brown paper sacks, mountains of garbage collect across the country between noon and 1PM. We’ve touched on this topic before, but every new excuse to talk about it is a great opportunity for an extra reminder.

Today’s particular reminder comes from the Huffington Post, who are offering tips on keeping your lunch extra-tasty and still relatively waste-free with some environmental science and extra-sound reasoning mixed in.

3. Plastic-free is the choice for me!: All that plastic that we use (and rarely reuse) takes a tremendous amount of energy and water to produce and isn’t recyclable in much of America (only water bottles are recyclable in Marin county!). Additionally, beware of using plastic containers for heating or freezing food. The U.S. Food & Drug Administration has stated that it’s possible for chemicals from these plastics to “migrate” into food. You can control “undesirable flavors” by using glass or ceramic storage containers when bringing food that requires re-heating or is high in fat (fat attracts toxins). Continue to use your plastic storage containers for sandwiches, fruits and anything else that won’t require a microwave but don’t buy new plastic containers! When you need new containers, move to glass or long-lasting stainless steel. As for the baggie issue, when packing my lunch, I prefer to stick with organic cotton snack bags, but for leak-resistance you can try fresh snack packs, which are food safe and made with phthalate-free plastic.

Not that microwaves are necessarily considered the go-to appliance for optimum health and safety, but migrating chemicals? Yikes! Interested in reading more about renewable sources, reusable bottles, and getting your kids involved? Read the whole article here.

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 10:46 am and is filed under The Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.