this hurts my brain

I'm realizing one of the hardest parts for me about this going green thing is how hard you have to think. Right before I went to the grocery store, our preschool teacher told me she's working on packaging. She buys one big tub of yogurt instead of ten little ones, stuff like that. I was thinking about this as I went shopping and was stunned to see all the environmentally unfriendly choices we're offered every day. The grocery store became a minefield of destructive choices packaged in shiny, pretty wrappers. My trip took at least twenty minutes longer than normal with all this extra deliberation, resulting in a squirmy unhappy kid and a frazzled burned-out mom. And then I came home to put my stuff in the fridge and saw my pre-green purchases with new eyes. That huge bag of individually wrapped cheese sticks, the microwave popcorn, the steak packed in styrofoam. Why do companies and stores keep offering this stuff? I understand why we keep buying it. It's so much work not to.

There's some capitalist, symbiotic relationship going on here between the producer and consumer. We're making agreements with each other to continue pretending convenience foods and packaging are benign, and so they keep churning this stuff out and we keep consuming it. So what do we do? I'm going to keep pushing myself (and my poor old brain) to learn how to make greener choices at the grocery store. And write an email about this experience to my local Fred Meyer. And maybe one to the headquarters too.