The Nag

There is a shop like that where I live but three miles away. They sell everything in dried form or just dry unpackaged such as coffee beans, nuts, seeds, flour, breakfast cereal, tea and dried fruits.  However some stuff still needs to be packaged such as processed food.

I just wish as a step towards that that everything sold in supermarkets was plain without any flavourings.  You could always add your own; customers use their imagination.  Also sold in different sizes to suit your needs.

It's called Unpackaged. It's only a small shop, but if we all shop there it will grow and become the new Tesco (without packaging) I'm certain of it.

...organic  fruit & veg come packed in compostable plastic.

Riverford are winning loads of awards, are way cheaper than Abel and Cole, use minimal packaging, and take back and reuse everything they do use.  You can get fruit + veg, meat, and all sorts of household and kitchen stuff.

www.riverford.co.uk

Processed food is very bad for the environment and your health anyway as it contains lots of different ingredients and additives, which are often chemically produced in the first place. Plus too much salt and flavour enhancers. On top of this, their production creates huge amounts of waste (the shorter the best before date the worse) - anyone interested in this issue should get the book "Waste - Uncovering The Global Food Scandal" by Tristram Stuart, it's really quite scary.
Riverford are great, they also send you recipes with every box or you can go to their website for more if you are lacking ideas about how to cook the veg to make it interesting and tasty.
If you can, grow your own. There's nothing more satisfying than cooking up what you've grown, even if it's only a tomato, a bit of rocket or some potatoes! They can be grown in growbags on a balcony, or even just some herbs on the window sill can make a difference on your personal carbon footprint!

It annoys me that if I want unpackaged stuff it can't be organic, and if I want orgnic British stuff it comes in big plastic bags. I recently wrote a letter to Tesco complaining about several things, including the fact they have some loose bins of British produce but it's never the organic stuff. i guess they can only have one loose bin per vegetable so people don't take the more expensive organic ones and pass them off as the others... but the simple solution would be to make the prices the same by taking mishapen veg and therefore not wasting so much that the prices are pushed up. Then they coudl have organic loose veg alongside the others, or ONLY organic loose veg!

In the Whole Food Store (High Street Kensington in London) most of the rice/pasta/fruit/veg/bread/cheese etc is all unpackaged and fairtrade/organic/free-range. It's a huge shop/resturant with an amazing variety.

I am trying very hard to only have my dustbin emptied once every two months to see if I can cut down on what I throw out. It's working well, and partly because I take my own plastic containers and used bags out with me. Fruit and veg goes straight into my shopping bag and if I buy meat or fish I hand over the plastic container -all my local shops are happy for me to do this - they just weigh it first and put the sticker on my own box. Scoop type shops are brilliant too.
Yoghurt pots etc go to a local playgroup and pretty much everything else can be recycled. It's time consuming though as I need to shop in local shops rather than supermarkets, so I sometimes fall off the wagon!
LibbyP