Green-up tip #8 – Prepare your own convenience foods

I know that people have busy lives these days hence the need for heavily packaged convenience foods.

The easiest solution to avoiding this is to prepare/package your own convenience foods, ahead of time, when you have a few moments free.

Lets take a simple example, raisins in a box for school lunches. (while these do not have such a high environmental impact as say, individually wrapped biscuits or chips, carrot sticks, mini tomatoes etc, they are a simple example which can be applied to any similar product.)

Step 1. Buy (a one time only investment) some small/mini sized plastic washable containers.
Step 2. Buy an organic bulk bag of raisins (bulk is cheaper, organic is healthier)
Step 3. On an afternoon, evening or weekend that you have a few moments free round-up the kids (if you have any) and set up a fun family assembly line and have them helping by putting a single portion of raisins in each container. Close the lids and voila you have a weeks or even month supply (if you have enough containers) of self packaged, eco friendly, convenience food! If you have more than one child, each child could have their own set of containers (decorated to their hearts desire, which makes the process even more fun!)

Involving the children in this sort of preparation or in any cooking or baking is great not only as a fun way of bonding but it also teaches valuable life-skills such as learning where our food comes from and how to prepare it. If the experience is fun they will also be excited to eat it later, which means no food wasted, which is good on the pocket and the environment.

Another great tip is for hummus which I always make at home for a 10th of the price and ‘ingredients control’ of what goes in it (ie. no artificial additives or preservatives) and I’ve recently read a tip in a great book called Low Cost Living by John Harrison.
Up until now I was using chickpeas from a can but have been wanting to use dried ones instead but would always forget to soak the night before. In his book John Harrison suggest pre soaking and cooking the chickpeas and then freezing them! What a great idea, the chickpeas will always be on hand and half the work will be done ahead of time. Thanks John!

I highly recommend visiting his website Low Cost Living for many great tips and recipes!

And remember the key to successfully avoiding convenience highly packaged food is to buy in bulk, package (with reusable packaging) yourself, and enjoy the many rewards including a happy, healthy family who knows about their food and great economic savings which ultimatly means having to work less, less need for convenience food and more time to prepare your own food. What a great circle of life!