Slaying the Plastic Dragon - Day 15 - Sack Cloth!

From Monasteryicons.com

Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone!  We will be celebrating it by eating pizza!  Yeah, we are going to the children's Stations of the Cross tonight at my parish.  They feed the kids pizza and then a nice lady with a guitar (it is all very guitar-mass in feel) sings the Stations of the Cross to the kids.

I only took my own kids once, but we have this little 17 month old living here so we are going to check it out with him in tow.

I think I'll do the corned beef thing on Saturday instead.

Now, on to other things!

I've discovered that a couple companies that are aimed at the speciality food market do package their food in nice cloth bags, I think to hearken back to the old days, perhaps?  Since these are specialty items they are costly.  For instance I compared the Carolina Plantation Rice costs to that of a 2 lb bag of rice from Target (wrapped in plastic) and there is no comparison in price.  Target's was something like $1.69, while the other was $9.82.  Of course, if you want to buy local or at least USA, the Carolina Rice is grown here in South Carolina.  I have no idea where the Target brand comes from.  I am willing to bet the quality of the rice from Carolina Plantation is probably much better, more flavor and nutrition than the other.  But still the price difference is something a buyer can't get around!

Anyone up for some stone ground grits?

Two other companies that also bag their rice (and grits) in cloth are Food For the Southern Soul and Matiz.

Directly from Spain!

It makes me wonder why something wrapped in plastic - that is made from fossil fuels and takes so much processing to produce is cheaper than something made from a renewable resource that people are producing all the time anyway (clothes are everywhere!).  Also, plastic is much more costly to deal with after use than cloth, which biodegrades and is easily reused anyway.  What gives?  Is it simply the scale of production? (mass production of plastic vs. particular production of this particular type of cloth for this little specialty niche?)  The fact that the plastic is lighter for shipping?

But at least there are products out there not packaged in plastic.  I plan to write the companies and tell them how much I appreciate that they have not hopped on the plastic bandwagon!  Maybe there is a way to encourage this type of packaging so that maybe one day it will become more common.

As an aside, at the same time that I was discovering these items packaged in cloth,  I started listening to Sidney Poitiers Spiritual Autobiography, The Measure of a Man.  I'm just at the very beginning where he is recounting his childhood on an island in the Bahamas.  His family were tomato farmers but they were very poor.  But he says it wasn't the crushing poverty of other places.  He roamed the island, eating fruit from the trees, there was the sea to fish from, salt ponds to get salt to preserve the fish, pigs and goats - so he never went hungry and he had an island paradise in which to play.  The economy was half cash, half barter.   There was no electricity and no running water, but everyone was like that, so no one felt poor because of it.  And clothes were made from sackcloth!  I envision them getting big sacks of rice and flour, using them up and then turning them into clothing.  I wonder, how much clothing do you really need in the Bahamas anyway?  Poitier remembers his childhood as a time of great simplicity and peace and family togetherness away from all the distractions that money would bring.

Speaking of flour sacks - I wonder if these are the authentic thing?  Somebody is still producing things from this material, it seems!

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Something more affordable than the specialty rice that also avoids plastic is Near East cous cous in little cardboard boxes.  No plastic there (except maybe in the flavor packets? Probably.)  I have not tried their rice, so I don't know how that is packaged, but the cous cous is so easy to prepare and is delicious!

My teens kept lobbying me to buy Pepperidge Farm Cookies in those little paper sacks.  I checked them out.  Here's what I found.