When Number One Son was a baby, I was blessed with a three-month subscription to a service that magically bought me soft, clean diapers and took away the icky ones. I was hooked. Not only wasn’t I adding more stuff to the landfill, my baby’s sensitive bottom (I can hear him rolling his eyeballs about now) was wrapped in something far better for it.
With Little One, I wanted to continue using cloth, but Darling Husband had a suggestion: let’s wash our own. Since he’s the Laundry Guy in our household, I could have the same easy life, and the person making the deliveries would be cute. I was sold.
I went online and bought $75 worth of organic cotton diapers and another $25 of covers and doodads. While I was there, I discovered legions of people devoted to cloth diapering, but in the end what appealed to me most wasn’t the nifty Velcro covers or the brownie points for being a good Earth denizen. It was the liberating realization that we would never run out of diapers again. No more calling the service before the truck left, upping the order to add ten more, no more forgetting to set out the bag on pickup day, no planning around vacations, and certainly never having to run to the store for more. Nope, diapers became like socks: need some, wash some.
The flimsy plastic bottle of water has become ubiquitous: on someone’s desk, a case in the back of the car (“for the kids”), in a catered buffet spread. One of the best selling brands of water is Aquafina. What most people don’t realize is that it is produced by PepsiCo, and is nothing more than filtered tap water. I would reckon that the vast majority of us have access to a faucet in our homes. It’s not a huge leap to remember a water bottle along with your wallet and cell phone. (If filtered water is important, filters for the fixture or a pitcher can provide the same product.) Imagine how good it feels, knowing you have a bottle of water in the car when you’re going through the deli checkout. Not only can you save yourself a dollar, you don’t have to worry about treacherous leaching plastic and bulging landfills.
For the same reasons, I adore my soymilk maker. It’s much easier to keep a stock of soybeans in a corner of the cupboard than it is to lug home case after case. I no longer have to decorticate containers to meet recycling requirements. I can use the milk I make for savory dishes or sweeten it for cocoa as I please (I sweetened it with Irish cream syrup the other evening…). The glass jug I use to store it in the fridge is washable and reusable. I never run out of soymilk. Could it be any better? In a perfect world, I would use local biodynamic soybeans, and would power the machine with solar panels on my roof instead of being beholden to PSE. I settle for organic beans from Eastern Washington, and keep waiting for the tipping point when solar technology catches up with my shady yard.
Remember the spinach scare last year? Because everyone, from mass-retail supermarkets to smaller stores like Trader Joe’s, was relying on the same large corporation to provide the bags of spinach, the whole thing fell apart. If you wanted spinach, you were simply out of luck. Unless of course, you grew your own or bought from a small, local producer—like we did. There were no limits on our enjoyment of spinach.
When you have an infant, diapers are a part of life. We all need water to survive. Food is a part of our everyday life, and how and what we eat has a huge influence on the quality of our life. When we took back the diapers from Kimberly-Clark and Procter & Gamble, they became a piece of clothing that we owned, and ceased being a revenue stream for a large corporation. When I put a purple Nalgene water bottle in my car, I cut off Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. When we grow or make our own food or source it locally, we are rejecting the over-packaged, mass-produced commodity designed to last forever and generate profits for truly glutinous corporations. Food can be true to itself, and feed us. The irony is that all these options wind up being cheaper. It seems there is no money in marketing to independent folks. So go ahead. Own your food. Be free.
