Looking Closer at Food: Extreme Overpackaging

Reading a recent Eat. Drink. Better. post on looking deeper than the organic label, I couldn’t help but think of something that happened to me a few months ago. It was a late night and I was too tired to trek out to my food co-op, so I found myself in big-name chain, Safeway.

Strolling the produce section, I saw something so absurd, I couldn’t help but pull out my camera-phone and grab a picture . Check out my photo after the jump…

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The photo you see here is of the individually plastic wrapped potatoes they were selling.

That’s right, dirty root vegetables all wrapped up in a shiny package. Do people even buy single potatoes? We all know you need more than that to make mashed potatoes. What makes the over-packaging even more grossly ridiculous is that if you look at the label, you can see that these spuds are organic.

I can just imagine how many people brought a bag of these home, thinking they were doing a great thing for the environment. It just goes to show, that you can’t rely on simply checking one label to know for sure how eco-friendly a product is.

As a vegan, that’s something I often remind myself. It isn’t always enough to simply scan the ingredients for animal products. Food comes with quite the history. We should always remind ourselves to look closer.

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