My Experience with Blue Apron

While recognizing that my somewhat cushy existence as an at-home dad/musician/writer doesn’t give me much leeway for complaining, after being the primary meal planner and preparer of the house for the past twenty years, I decided that I needed a break.  It wasn’t so much the shopping and cooking that bothered me as it was the planning.  Deciding what to eat in order to satisfy everyone’s tastes and restrictions was getting to be a mental chore, so for my 50th birthday I requested a gift certificate to Blue Apron, a meal delivery service that supplies its customers with all the ingredients needed to cook recipes you choose on-line.  Easy peasy, and it seemed like a fine antidote to the meal planning virus I’d contracted. 

While I’ve enjoyed aspects of the service, after eight weeks of using Blue Apron, I’ve decided that the pros don’t outweigh the cons, and this morning I cancelled my service.  Let me preface this by saying that if both my wife and I were working full-time, I might not be so quick to abort the mission.  The fact that I have a lot of flexibility to shop and prepare meals changes the ledger considerably.

So why did I cancel?  There were three things that made me feel uneasy about the service, as good as it might be. 

First, it’s not cheap.  I of course knew that going in, but seeing the bill show up on the credit card each week started to wear on me, especially knowing full-well that I could easily drive to a grocery store to pick up whatever food I needed at a fraction of the cost.  I was paying $10 per person per meal, so $80 a week.  This is not unbelievably expensive, and I doubt a company could do it for much less, but nevertheless, price was one nagging concern.

Second, I found my shopping to be much less frequent, which on the surface is a good thing, but my trips became so infrequent and my habits so poor that our food inventory suffered as a result.  It was so easy to say “I’ve got dinner all set for tonight – we can hang in there one more day before I do another shopping run” that we’d be left to face a breakfast of toast and a lunch of peanut butter sandwiches (not that there's anything wrong with that).  We also kept running out of basic items like milk, yogurt and bananas.  In short, I grew terribly lazy and used Blue Apron as an excuse to avoid shopping at all costs.

But the biggest reason for cancelling the service is the staggering amount of waste created each week by the Blue Apron deliveries.  As a guy who started recycling two decades before curbside pickup was a thing, unnecessary waste is an important point for me.  Ellen Cushing wrote a nice summary of the waste incurred with a service like Blue Apron (competitors have similar issues) and the somewhat disingenuous claim that most of the materials can be recycled.  Blue Apron used to have a free recycling program that allowed customers to send all the contents back to the company, but this has been cancelled, no doubt due to the cost.

If Blue Apron or a service like it could be localized so that – like the Chicago-based Oberweis dairy deliver service – we could have a cooler with reusable ice packs, I would be on-board.  Eliminate the box and the ice packs, include a synthetic insulator to separate cold items from the rest, and this could be a service that yields nothing more than a few small plastic bags.  

There are also grocery delivery businesses like Instacart and Peapod that are good fits for some people, and I may one day yield to that temptation, but for now I’m going to go back to shopping more regularly and forcing my family to share the burden by choosing a few meals each week that they want me to shop and cook for.  At least that’s the plan.  How long before it goes awry?

Reducing Waste From Our Lives

In Amy Korst’s how-to book, The Zero Waste Lifestyle, she describes how she and her husband went from normal garbage-producing Americans to generating less than three pounds of trash per year (enough to fill a shoe box), a feat which I suppose could cause some folks to intermittently consider them role models or complete wackjobs.  Either way, just because the author’s family is “all-in” doesn’t mean the rest of us should be “all out,” and to Korst’s great credit, the message of her book isn’t one of deprivation and denouncement of all things 21^st Century, but rather an encouragement to start thinking about garbage differently and to take steps towards reducing it.  To help the reader along, she illustrates what other American’s have done – some whose goals are quite lofty, others whose missions are more modest.

Prior to reading her book, I felt like my family was already practicing what I consider to be the low-hanging fruit of waste reduction, and I wanted additional ideas.  My family of five normally produces about 1½ kitchen bags of garbage per week.  Less than many.  More than most, especially if one considers the world beyond the U.S.’s borders.  But I wondered if there were other simple steps I could take.  Turns out there are, and I’ve incorporated a few additional practices in the past few months without any effort at all.

Here’s what we’d already been doing:

1)      Using reusable grocery bags, lunch boxes and lunch food containers.

2)      Double siding nearly all of our printing paper, including sheets my kids bring home from school.

3)      Recycling anything we can, even those things that our city doesn’t pick up: things like electronics, ink cartridges, batteries, old smoke alarms, fluorescent light bulbs, etc.  (note: recycling is not the panacea some people think it is.  More on that later.)

4)      Choosing cloth napkins rather than paper napkins (most of the time).

5)      Avoiding using paper plates, plastic utensils and plastic cups.  There are exceptions, but we now use these products maybe a few times a year.

6)      Composting all of our food-based scraps and using the compost in our garden each year (this is neither difficult, smelly nor messy.  Couldn’t be easier and the benefits are huge).

As a result of these efforts, we’ve virtually eliminated plastic baggies from our lives, have limited the number of plastic grocery bags we accumulate, created garbage that’s much less messy and limited our new paper consumption to approximately two reams a year.

Not perfect, but a start.

I looked for addition ideas in Korst’s book.  Some I found useful, some not so much, but that’s cool.  The idea is do what you can and then do a little more.  The most important accomplishment of her book is to get readers to start thinking about garbage differently.  As a result, in addition to using some of her suggestions directly, I came up with a few of my own, and continue to ask the question: is this disposable item necessary, or can there be another way?

Here’s what we’ve incorporated into our lifestyle since reading Korst’s book:

1)      We’ve started using reusable produce bags.  I was concerned that these mesh bags might pose a problem for cashiers, but that hasn’t been the case at all.  In fact, most of the time I get compliments for using them, and now we can even purchase the bags at our local grocery store, so they’re becoming less of a novelty.

2)      I no longer use Swiffer sheets for my hardwood floors.  Instead, I use cut-to-size scrap pieces of fleece we had laying around.  When they get overly dusty, I grab off the clumps and throw the fleece in the wash.  Wa la (this was my own idea, and it works beautifully).

3)      I no longer throw out scraps of wood, but rather use them as kindling for our camping and backyard fires.

4)      When I have a choice between purchasing something in a plastic bottle vs. something in aluminum or glass, I choose the latter.  Recycling is a messy business, and it’s important to note that not all recycling is created equal.  Aluminum and steel recycle very efficiently compared to, say, paper and plastic.  Best to avoid plastic whenever possible for a variety of reasons.

5)      I don’t use paper towels very often, but when I do they come from post-consumer material.  That goes for bathroom tissue, too.  Is it as soft?  Heck no!  But it’s really not a big deal.

6)      I no longer buy plastic bags for pet waste.

About that last point, allow me to elaborate about plastic bags.  I’ve heard some people say, “Why should I use canvas bags at grocery stores when I reuse the plastic bags for my dog’s or cat’s waste?  And besides, those reusable grocery store bags don’t last very long and I end up having to throw them out.”  Good questions, for sure.  Here’s what my recent experience has been. 

First, I’ve been using some grocery store bags for over fifteen years, but they’re not the cheap synthetic bags you’ll find at Target and other stores.  They’re made of thicker cotton – almost like denim – and these last forever.  Here’s an example.

As for pet waste, what I’ve found is that I have more sources for carrying waste than I realized.  Consider the following:

1)      The liners of cereal boxes.  It never occurred to me to use these prior to reading Korst’s book, but now I use each and every one of them.  In the morning when we finish up a box of cereal, I take the liner out and clean the cats’ little boxes.  Yes, it’s still producing waste, but it’s using what I already have.  It’s a small step.

2)      The bags that paper towels and toilet paper come in.  These work great for litter, and would probably even work for dog waste in the back yard.

3)      Newspaper bags.  You might be saying, “If you really care about eliminating waste, why get a paper in the first place?”  Good point.  This will be one of my goals in the upcoming weeks.  I only get the Sunday paper, but it’s a huge waste.  However, I also get a neighborhood paper delivered automatically, and I reuse the bag it comes in for pet waste.

There is so much more I can do, and little by little, I’m reducing my family’s garbage addiction.  Some of Korst’s suggestions seem almost batty, like taking a glass straw when you go out to restaurants or convincing women to stop using tampons or pads.  Not all of her suggestions are for everyone.  But there’s no question that all of us can do better.

Why not take some modest steps and see where it takes you?