The Cool Down
Shopper left furious after purchase on dad’s recent grocery store trip: ‘Totally wipes out the benefit’
Kendall Burke – October 29, 2023
A Redditor who found a baffling instance of excessive plastic took to the r/anticonsumption subreddit to voice their frustrations.
The poster said their dad bought the offending cucumber — which was covered in not one, but two layers of single-use plastic — during a recent grocery run, seemingly at U.K. chain Morrison’s, given the branding The Greengrocer’s on Market Street.
“All this plastic for HALF A F******* CUCUMBER,” the frustrated Redditor wrote.
The image reveals that the package actually contains just half a cucumber, which could be the reason for wrapping it in so much plastic, as cut vegetables and fruit spoil faster than uncut ones. However, that raises the question, why would anyone sell just half a cucumber.
Commenters agreed with the original poster’s sentiment.
One shared, “The other day I saw organic cilantro on a plastic tray, wrapped with plastic. Totally wipes out the benefit of organic.”
Another joked, “Nice I need a plastic bag to transport it too please.”
While plastic wrap can reduce how quickly food spoils, a main cause of consumer-level food waste, it can take anywhere between 20 and 500 years (or more by some estimates) to break down in our landfills and oceans.
Innovative solutions to this issue are being perfected every day. Multiple companies have debuted versions of plastic-free “plastic” wrap, with one particularly cool option that sprays on like a Spiderman web. There are also myriad groups at work on an international and local level to clean up our existing ocean plastic problem.