Posted by Snow in 
I was not raised vegetarian. I was not raised even thisclose to vegetarianism. Those people were the weirdos. They munched granola. They wore weird old clothes. They wore bell-bottoms and had long hair in the wrong places. But maybe they knew what they were doing. Veganism had an unpleasant odor.
We microwaved the Tv dinners and were cool. We were all about meat, steak, burgers, chops, roasts, stews, etc. Some form of potato infused every meal. The meat was the focus of every meal, the sides and salad mere accents. Serving size was larger than a pizza slice when possible.
As the makeshift home help prepping meals for a family of 6, I saw all the groceries transform into trash. We scraped a lot of food into the waste bins or down the drain. Without a thought. A meal of vegetables was exotic and due only to a fuel and winter extreme we never experienced.
The toll on the landscape was obvious. Rampant transition from packaging wrapping to packaged mix to packaged vegetables to packages dishwashing detergent to packaged desserts kept the waste removal companies ticking. Lots of prepared food, lots of mixes. And my mom was a good cook.
But as I have investigated the consumerism waste present everywhere, it is hard not to see the connection between outright carnivore lifestyles and gross consumer waste. The more conscious you are about waste, the less of it you will create.
Contrast against today’s paper bags of farmer’s market fruits and vegetables used from flesh to seed to compost. Contrast against centuries of landfills full of tin cans, unrecycled plastic waste, and gross consumer neglect of the environment. Massive plastics of styrofoams and cellphane nevermore.
It would have been unthinkable to grow anything to eat. The consumer mores were too advertising driven, too coated in conspicuous consumption. Herb gardens and raised vegetable boxes would have been a statement of near poverty in the surburban neighborhood of my youth. Re-use of anything would have bene considered eccentric.
The change comes when you realize you are taking the trash to the curb for the week and the tote is a small plastic bag versus two dumpster sizes bins on wheels. You realize you are getting excited about how full the blue recycling bin is and how many props you feel you’ve earned filling it.
Converting trash from the household kitchen into a small bag of waste means flattening packages, being conscious of over wrapped and over packaged meal elements, and eating organic and concentrated vegetative matter with no cans, plastics, or sauce mix wrappers. The compost from the kitchen and the herb garden foodstuffs make the difference.
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