Yeah; back in the day it used to be wooden toothpicks to spear stuff, and small wooden spoons for things that couldn't be speared. I can only assume things moved to plastic because of cost, which is nauseating.

Never mind how everything in Trader Joe's is packaged in plastic.

Plastic wrapped fruit. I can't believe it. Fruit comes with its own already biodegradable container!

F Trader Joe's fruit and veg.

While it's more excessive in the US, or at least Trader Joe's in my experience, various fruits and vegetables are regularly found in plastic in the European country I live in and others I've visited. Grapes, packs of apples or peaches, various peppers, etc. I find it unnecessary in some of these cases as well, unfortunately. It seemed better in local stalls that are especially plentiful in certain larger cities.

Is this a regional thing? Ours just has fruit and veggies for the taking, like any other supermarket.

Are you sure they're not biodegradable "plastic" forks?

That's what my Trader Joe's uses. I believe they're made out of cornstarch.

biodegradable plastics are deceiving because the landfill they go into must be specifically tailored to biodegrade the plastics. Otherwise they stay there forever, just like regular plastic.

> biodegradable plastic

This is a distinction without a difference - all forks are biodegradable, the question is over what time-frame.

You mean even in 2018-2019 they hadn't switched plastic forks/spoons for wood? Come on

Most American consumers who find themselves at the local TJs or Whole Foods should probably feel way, way worse about driving to the store than about little plastic spoons.

I’m not bicycling in 20 degrees Fahrenheit to shop for a family of 4, bags strapped to a bike. And there’s no public transportation. I think I’ma pretty regular American consumer. So I should feel guilty about this according to you?

Maybe not guilty but reflect on the many costs involved and try to lend your political voice to improvements. We burn a ton of fossil fuel moving people around with 10-20x their weight in metal; EVs can improve that somewhat but even if you can charge your renewably they still have a substantial CO2 cost in their manufacturing and the massive roads needed due to the intrinsic inefficiency of private vehicles. The associated low-density lifestyle similarly adds a big energy cost and makes transit hard to build. There are also many deaths and life-altering injuries annually, not to mention the way everything is made more expensive to subsidize vehicle storage in addition to the direct costs many people struggle with.

All of that exists because the system is built to encourage it, and building something more sustainable means lots of us need to start calling for major changes. I think it's reasonable to worry about that even if you didn't personally create the problem.

I typically shop on a bike for my family of six at -15 to -25 C in Finland. But I live close to a large store and bike roads are excellent and usually cleared if snow.

You’re a better person than me. Sorry, I’m not doing that. For the record, I’m roughly 6.5 km from a market. I wouldn’t even know how to strap 20 bags to a bicycle. How do you?

This thread has verged into "30-50 feral hogs" territory. I have never, even once, seen a person with 20 bags of groceries.

I suspect that for most people, when they are choosing where to live, environmental effects are way down the list. More important are: Will my kids go to a good school? Are the poor people (and associated social problems) far away from me?

Which is to say that if you choose to live someplace where you can't walk or ride a bike or have mass transit access to daily needs, you made that decision. I'm not going to tell you that you are wrong, though.

Understood, and you are right. I’m just not going to feel blame or guilt that I drive to buy food because our priorities are different.

Just have the sample. Your refusal to not consume it isn't going to change them buying the plastic, because given the choice, people aren't going to stop sampling in the aggregate. And at that point you're just signaling to other people in a really silly way.

If you really care, talk to your local representatives or write to Trader Joes and Whole Foods. Anything else is posturing. Not taking a sample which costs them a few cents on the dollar is not taking action.

I'm not going to stop, personally. They can give it to me in paper wrapping instead if they want to make a difference, and in fact, with their cups, they already do. Let someone invest in paper sampling spoons.

> If you really care, talk to your local representatives or write to Trader Joes and Whole Foods. Anything else is posturing.

Or you can do both.

> Your refusal to not consume it isn't going to change them buying the plastic, because given the choice, people aren't going to stop sampling in the aggregate. And at that point you're just signaling to other people in a really silly way.

This is a strange viewpoint to me. Acting based on your principles in your day-to-day life isn't just about signaling to others. It's about how you live your life, and acting "in tune" with your beliefs can lead you to profound happiness. If you decide that single-use plastics are bad for the environment, and you like the environment, then you try to avoid them. It's pretty simple.

But I don't even think that signaling is silly. Some people are convinced more by actions than words. I've reduced the amount of waste I produce by bringing containers to get stuff from bulk foods sections, literally because I saw someone doing it and realized it was possible. Before that, I would've thought "oh man it sucks that you have to get granola in single-use plastic, but oh well, that's life." As strange as it sounds, I had never even considered bulk food sections, even though I know the mantra "plastic bad".

If you extend your arguments, they imply that acting based on your principles in day-to-day life is pointless (or merely "posturing") because we are all small and insignificant, and the only thing that matters is trying to change laws. But I think you have it partially backward. People acting on their strong beliefs and spreading those ideas to others is what eventually invigorates political changes in the first place.

Even setting aside the importance of principles, every spoon OP doesn't use is a spoon that doesn't end up in a landfill.

And my point is that it's like saying I didn't fill up my tank with gas today: it didn't stop oil refineries from producing gasoline.

If enough people do it, it adds up. If you continuously tried to push it at least a couple more days before using your car, over a year that would add up to a couple less tanks of gas. In a nation of 280 million cars, that uses about 340 million gallons of gasoline a day, you could easily carve off a couple of weeks there. Might not seem like a lot, but that's 56 million tons of CO2 not released into the atmosphere.

There's no ethical consumption under capitalism, which is why I'm going to keep my slaves but vote really hard against slavery.

Is there ethical consumption under any system?

We can't look for the homework to copy, we must study ourselves.