No wraps. No boxes. At Unpackaged in London, food stays naked.
beunpackaged.com
Many years ago, I remember going grocery shopping with a boyfriend in college. As we moved through the produce aisles, I was struck to see how he stocked our cart. Rather than picking out tomatoes, putting them in a plastic sack, weighing and labeling them, he simply....put them in our cart. Naked. No sack.
I remember politely asking him if he'd like me to bag those up for him. "No need," he said.
And that was the last time I bagged produce at the grocery store.
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When you think about it, how necessary is food packaging? Not very. You'll wash your produce when you get home. Your dry goods can go in reusable burlap or cloth bags. Your liquids can be poured into glass jars or bottles. We're just so accustomed to having our food wrapped in brightly-colored bags and boxes, that when a business makes a shockingly simple choice like Unpackaged in London, it feels radical. Food with no nutrition labels? Food with no logos? Food with no health promises stamped on the front? And then you realize: we've trusted marketers for way too long to explain our own food to us.
Here in the States, San Francisco was the first locale to stake a claim in the grocery bag reduction effort. Almost two years ago, the city implemented the first plastic bag ban in the U.S. But across the pond, Catherine Conway wanted to nix out the stuff entirely, and founded Unpackaged. From the store's website:
"While some packaging is recycled, most ends up in landfill sites and some packaging is just difficult and often impossible to recycle. According to government figures, landfill sites for London's non-hazardous rubbish are likely to be full by the end of next year and other landfill sites in the South East will run out of capacity by early 2013. In 2008, Islington Council achieved a recycling rate of only 30% showing that more radical solutions are needed over and above recycling. Recycling is certainly part of the solution, but it will only work if we use less packaging in the first place and adopt more reusable ways of doing things- it is this ethos of reuse that Unpackaged is based on."
Looking at photos of the shop on WeHeart, you remember how beautiful fresh, natural food looks...left in its naked state.
The future - by way of the past - has officially arrived in London.
