It's What We're Reading Now

No Impact Man

I picked up No Impact Man, by Colin Beavan, at the library on Sunday, the day we posted a piece on our blog about our Plastic-Free Dream. [Digression: I just need to say that the library is an amazing place. For years Steve and I have gone to bookstores and purchased books just because we “had to have them.” Now we walk just two blocks to the local branch of the San Francisco Public Library where we can borrow as many books as we want at anytime, and if we don’t read them we don’t feel guilty for spending the money. Check out your local library before purchasing your next book.] While we don’t plan on going on an impact-free diet, we’ll still use electricity and toilet paper, I’m sure it’s going to give us helpful information on reducing regular plastic use.

The next part of this post is going to be a little critical of Steve–sorry Sweetie. On Sunday, Steve made the delicious frittata with stinging nettle. (If you didn’t read the post let’s just say we were popular with the BDSM Googlers  for a minute.) There was enough left over for Steve to take for lunch today and for my lunch as well. To my surprise, I opened the fridge and pulled it out it for lunch and I discovered that it was wrapped in parchment … AND plastic. Was the plastic wrap really necessary? Couldn’t it have been stored in a Tupperware container instead? I also noticed that the blanching broth from the stinging nettle was also covered in plastic. We do have mason jars with lids that Steve could have used instead, eliminating the need for the plastic wrap cover. So, unfortunately, on the first day of our plastic-free life, Steve used plastic wrap twice when it wasn’t necessary at all.

Plastic FAIL

I know to many I’m sounding like a nag, which I probably am, but if we are truly going to stand by our pact to reduce our use of plastic we both need to take that first step together. Sweetie, I am sorry for the public humiliation, but the next time you reach for the plastic wrap I hope you’ll remember this blog entry and that it makes you think twice about wrapping anything in plastic.

With Love, Jason

Explanation for the title revision “Busted!”: Writing a blog with your husband can be challenging at times. In our case, Steve’s grammar is impeccable and I like to have him review and edit my posts before I publish them. Sometimes he gets a bit carried away changing the style and tone of them, and publishing them before I have a chance to review. For yesterday’s blog, Steve titled it “Busted!” and posted it before I had a chance to agree to it. In my opinion it set the tone of the blog to be very accusatorial and finger-pointing at Steve, which was not my intention at all. I may be anally retentive when it comes to certain things, but in this case I just wanted to set our Plastic-free dream off on the right foot. I’ve changed the title to reflect my true intension, “Hard Habit to Break” and hope that with that change my true tone is reflected in the blog post. Of course, now that I have spent the last paragraph explaining all this it makes me sound like a true prick, but I’ll let you be the judge of it.