Renaissance Woman

As you could probably guess, styrofoam egg cartons bug the crap out of me.  I usually buy the organic eggs from Safeway and they come in cardboard cartons.  But when we got out to the Hutterite colony I can buy local eggs for less then half the price of the organic.  Problem is, they come in styrofoam cartons. So the last time we went out, I took the old, heirloom egg basket that I acquired from one of my grandmothers, and got the nice Hutterite lady (Sarah) to get me eggs without a carton.  Straight from the cardboard flat, the eggs went into my basket and came home that way. Now, the Hutterites will take the cartons back for re-use, but they can only be re-used so many times before they are worn out.  This just takes me out of the loop and removes my responsibility for that carton.  Remember ... there are always options. P.S. - if you have an option of buying eggs directly from the layers (or their owners) I don't think you need a special baske...

In the past couple of years, we've been looking into ways to eat more sustainably - that means buying locally or at least buying organic. We usually buy 10kg (22lb) bags of flour at the grocery store for something like $12-14 a bag.  It's neither local or organic.  It pisses me off.  So I looked into a couple of things.  Safeway sells 1.8kg bags of organic, whole wheat flour from SunnyBoy, which is a mill located in Camrose - about a half hour drive from our house.  The small bags that Safeway sells cost about $7 and are plastic (!).  So expensive and not good packaging as far as I'm concerned. So I e-mailed the SunnyBoy mill and asked if I could buy the organic flour in something other than plastic.  Sure enough, if you make arrangements, you can buy at 20kg bag from the mill and it comes in paper. The cost is $32 - making it slightly more expensive than the non-organic variety, but less than half the cost of buying it in the small plastic ...