Shopping plastic-free makes me cross and hungry

In the fourth part of her diary about the challenges of giving up single-use plastic for Lent, Anne-Marie Trevelyan MP is eating more fruit and vegetables – but try telling her son he won't get any Parmesan cheese

My Friday supermarket visit had left me ranting in the bread aisle (PA)

It’s been over a month since I challenged myself to avoid buying anything which has single use plastic as part of its packaging.

I’ve lost weight (no chocolate bars come in paper these days), and I’ve also saved money by not grabbing tea or coffee on the go, or buying pre-prepared food for my journeys north and south each week.

As a result, I am hungry quite a lot of the time – and cross more often than is good for me, particularly when I try to do the family shop late on a Friday night after a long week.

It really should not be so difficult to be able to buy goods which aren’t wrapped in single use plastic packaging, particularly in supermarkets, where I would have thought that choice would be a positive profile activity.

I took my 18-year-old with me to Morrisons this Friday, and made him look at the aisles through my “no plastic” glasses. He was amazed and shocked to see just what I meant.

Having offered to cook his special carbonara dish for us all on Saturday night, he really wanted some Parmesan cheese. We tried the cheese counter, but apparently the large Parmesan there was only for display purposes and so my budding chef was forced to get the pre-packaged, pre-vac-packed, plastic-enveloped chunks.

Never let it be said that the young are not interested in politics – my boy was vociferous on the idiocy of all this; perhaps emboldened by being forced to buy the plastic-wrapped cheese himself!

I must say, I’m hugely grateful to all those who are supporting my efforts by sending me top tips on good products which are not subsumed by unnecessary plastic wrapping. The challenge of the loo roll multipack has been partially solved in that I have found I can buy recycled paper loo roll, wrapped in paper and a cardboard box online.

Yet it is substantially more expensive than the average supermarket products. Can this be right? I wonder if it is a consequence of packaging companies having moved to plastic to reduce weight and cost, ensuring a higher profit margin for the supermarkets.


 The Refill campaign aims to break our addiction to buying endless bottles of water

A great discovery this weekend was that the Costa in Berwick-upon-Tweed is now part of the Refill campaign: a practical, national crusade that aims to make refilling your reusable water bottle (no more single use plastic bottles!) easy, convenient and cheap by introducing tap-water refill points on every street.

The number of locations is growing week by week and will make a real difference – because the reality is that it’s got to be easy and accessible if we are going to change our habits.

More frustratingly, all those lovely processed products which we enjoy – from cooked meats and pate to dips, yoghurts and spreads, not to mention a host of other pre-prepared foods that make our busy lives easier – seem universally to come wrapped in plastic to aid speed of delivery to our shopping baskets.

So if I wanted to take my own Tupperware boxes to the shops (like I now do with my own baskets to avoid using plastic bags), would this work?

I discussed this at some length with the lovely lady on the Sainsbury’s deli counter on Saturday (I had to go there to get some fresh bread, which is NOT pre-bagged in plastic, unlike Morrisons, where my Friday shopping visit had left me ranting in the bread aisle – and popping a few unwrapped sourdough buns into a “mushrooms” paper bag).

One problem with my own boxes might be that, if I hadn’t washed them properly then became ill, it could be less straightforward to prove that the product I had bought was the source. So here we have a question about health and safety rules and regulations which needs careful consideration.

Certainly there are many health benefits to my attempt to give up plastic – more water (from a tap) and fewer sweetened drinks; more fruit (which comes pre-wrapped in its own skin) and less chocolate – indeed, fewer processed foods (which require packaging and are often full of salt) overall.

The challenge we have ahead of us is to make the choice to shop plastic-free, or as near to plastic-free as possible, an easy one to make.

By now we should all recognise the reality of our plastic use: the turtle caught in a drinks can wrapper; the fish found to be full of microplastics; the oceans and rivers awash with plastic waste.

Surely the desire to stop this pollution of our planet, and to leave it in a better place than we found it, should be sufficient motivation for us to change our consumption habits – and for producers to change how they present their wares to us.

I am meeting with Tesco this week, and I hope they will commit to helping the customer make the right choice for our environment.

It’s our world to look after or trash. Let’s work together to make sure we are heading in the right direction once again.

Anne-Marie Trevelyan is MP for Berwick-upon-Tweed and PPS to the Ministerial Team, Ministry of Defence