Bread is such a staple food in most households and it usually comes wrapped in single-use bags with those throw-away clips.

Many supermarkets do take soft plastics now and recycle them, but most plastics never reach these collection points, and like I’ve said before – refusing first, and reusing is a better option than recycling. Best is choosing naked bread – homemade or from a bakery.

Take your own bag and enjoy gorgeous ‘real’ bread.

To learn more about growing a permaculture garden simply and easily, check out our course The Incredible Edible Garden and learn how to design your own permaculture landscape in our Permaculture Design Course.

Transcript:

Hi! Welcome back it’s Morag Gamble from Permaculture Life and the Permaculture Education Institute and every day live at a four o’clock. Talking about some other way that you can get rid of single-use plastics in your life. 

And we’ve talked every day since the 1st of July about some different kind of tip, and one of the things that I find often brings single-use plastic into our homes. It’s things like bread packaging. So every single loaf of bread is now covered in plastic packaging and has those dreadful little clips on them. So you may find ways that you can reuse those which are great. But if there’s a way that you could actually bypass having that plastic bag in the first place, that’s even better. So I’ve always source out well, there’s obviously two ways that you could do that. One is to start baking your own bread or sauce bread from a bakery that you can actually take your own packaging from. So I’m living in a place called Crystal Waters Eco Village, which is a Permaculture Village in Southeast

Queensland. And one of the wonderful things about this place is that there’s a village green. And every Saturday morning the Baker has beautiful bread. So they would find sourdough organic breads, and they have things like five seeds and olive Infanta breads. And so all I need to do is take down a little bag, and I can get all the breads I want and bring them back. And then I just wash it out and use it again, or actually just store the breads in these all week, it’s fantastic! 

So I’m sure there’s a bakery not far from you that you could maybe do something similar with. Or even some of those standard bakeries that are around and just if you choose not to have it a sliced bread. You can quite possibly just take the loaf and stick it in your basket or a bag that you take along, and then you can come home. And as long as you’ve got a good quality bread knife,it’s really easy to either get sort of thin slices or thick slices. And that way, you can really get away from having all of those plastic bags that come with your breads. And the quality of the bread is often much better you know. So for my kids, for example, they would only need to say one slice of this to maybe two or three of the other really soft breads. So you also get into making your own, I know there’s everything from bread makers too. But you know, this whole idea of actually cooking up sourdough bread is just a wonderful thing. It’s getting back into that culture of food because it is a cultured food. And it’s about really embracing slow foods and cooking from scratch in so many different ways. Whether it be from bread to your cheese, to your pestos, to your tomato sauces. For your pastures whatever it might be then, cooking from scratch really helps you not only to get really great food but often sourcing local food. Either from your garden or from your local farmers’ market. And then doing it in a way that requires you do not have to engage in the whole plastic world. So join me again tomorrow, we’ll explore another plastic-free tip. Either inside my home or out in my garden. And check out the links below too, of some of the things that I’ve got there. About what is permaculture and ways you could learn more about actually embracing a permaculture life.