Food Storage

My husband and I decided when we got engaged that getting married would provide the perfect opportunity to change some bad food habits. Neither of us lived in our apartment before the wedding, so getting married involved not only a big wedding but a big move and a big adjustment. What better time to change a habit than when you're already in the middle of a huge upheaval?

One of the simplest and biggest decisions we made was to stop using plastic for our food storage. That meant no tupperware, no plastic wrap, no zip-loc bags--but also no plastic water bottles or milk jugs, or anything like that.

We had several reasons for this. The biggest one is that we just don't believe plastic is healthy (see this link or consult Google for some of our reasons why). Anyone who's stored food in plastic for a few days knows that it eventually starts to taste like plastic. Have you ever wondered why? What chemicals are getting into your food to make that happen?

I also don't like to use disposable products more than I have to. It feels wasteful to me, which I have a problem with both for environmental and for financial reasons. If I'm going to pay something, I want it to last.

So, we decided to store our food in glass. We even try to pour our milk into a glass pitcher when we bring it home from the grocery store (we can't afford to buy the milk that comes in glass jars, delicious though it looks).

To make this easier, we decided to get several sets of Pyrex storage containers. These come in all sorts of sizes and have rubber lids. Target, Wal-Mart, and several other stores sell box sets of various shapes and sizes of storage ware.

The glass cleans off very easily and keeps food just as fresh if not fresher than food stored in plastic. And they're permanent! I can't even imagine how much we've saved by not buying zip loc bags, sandwich bags, plastic wrap, gladware, and all those sorts of things, and how much we're going to continue saving over the years.