It's easy to buy an energy bar, protein bar, fruit and nut bar on the way to the backcountry. Typically, if I was heading for the hills, my pack would contain a few. Since I couldn't swing by the Co-op for easy packable sustenance on the way, and I was going to be spending the day skinning up a mountain, I had to come prepared. 

I made sweet potato chips and turkey meatballs. Great pack food in lightweight containers. The dogs liked it too!

We had a huge May 11-12, 2011 snow storm. It buried the baby mint that was sprouting out of my perennial herb garden. I dug through the snow and harvested some unpackaged, delicious and nutritious mint for tonight's salad. 

The mint, alongside the lettuce and radish salad, tossed with bulk maple syrup, organic olive oil and sherry vinegar dressing tasted like spring. 

Up here, the soil is not that great. Even after a big rain, the soil dries out within a few days. The ecological beauty of spring snow is that it melts slowly seeping into the soil and nourishing the plant life, gradually. This gives the plants and seeds in the ground a better drink of water and a vigorous start to the growing season. 

This trick of nature makes perennial gardens in the mountains, and around the country,  so tantalizing. You don't have to do anything! The plants come up to feed you year after year, at just the right time each year - just when the conditions are perfect. I appreciate starting seeds indoors at the end of winter and deciding when to plant and when to water. However, for sustainability purposes, nothing beats a perennial edible ecosystem garden. No packaging. No transport. No water. Builds soil. Builds habitat. Highly nutritious. 

Mint is one exceptional perennial edible. It gets a bad wrap because it spreads and is quite vigorous, but I have never minded. Not only can you add it to salad and steep it for tea, you also have your very own fresh Mojito bar, right in your own backyard. 

I'm not always the best dinner guest. I cringe I when see reams of plastic and tin foil smothering otherwise perfectly good food. Here are some tricks and tips for going packageless at home. 

When you can only use half of the cantelope, onion or other round fruit or vegetable, simply place it on a plate and into the fridge. No need for plastic wrap!

Place a cookie sheet over your casserole and there is no need for tin foil!

Great experience at the newly opened Alfafa's in Boulder. All the hippy kids working there were totally into this package-less experiment and were ready to help me out. 

I really wanted olives from the olive bar but I had only brought produce bags and no containers so I had to be satisfied with one taster. 

Veggies at Alfafa's. The kind cashier helped arrange them for the photo. 

People get hyper, people get defensive, when it comes to food, like they do with with culture, or religion, or political persuasion. It is how we see the world. It is our idea of truth.  

It is our most direct connection and daily contact with the world. It is how the world we live in nourishes us, in the most direct and obvious way. It is the decision we make more times a day than any other decision. 

What to eat. How to feed ourselves. How to grow, raise or catch our food. How to care for our families.

These decisions define the culture that we each live in. These decisions describe our way of viewing the world and how we have decided to live in it. Do you pray before you eat? Or when you plant the seeds? Or when you kill the deer? If so, what do you say? What does this food mean to you? What does it mean to you when the sun shines and rain rains on the seed you have planted and you see it grow? What does it mean to you to kill an animal? Do you believe your health or your well-being or your Being are built through the food you choose? Through the way you choose to participate in this most intimate of chores. 

Food is at the root of culture (excuse the pun). A culture's relationship to food defines it. Does the culture buy apples from the farm just outside of town from a boy pulling a cart or from a mega-corporation that poisons the planet and its customers with pesticides, plastics and petroleum? 

When a culture has gelled, has defined itself, that culture becomes protective of itself. Its food tradition, its language, its land, its people, its medicines. The culture becomes static because it fails to question itself and to improve. You can see this throughout time. But now, our food, and the disease it is causing to befall our people, is asking us to question it. 

We Americans have created a food culture, a food cult, of packaged, processed, toxic food. The massive marketing of a new religion, a sickened malnourished, junk-food culture. It's time to take  a breath America, and ask, really, why are we doing it this way?

Day - 3 my husband did the grocery shopping. Today, Richie broke the ice at Whole Foods trying to get meat into a glass tupperware container that he carried from home. We were concerned that the meat counter guys would have to place paper under the meat to weigh it out on the scale. Guess what - they didn't have to. Like this happens every day, the guy put the tupperware onto the scale, Tared the scale (zeroed it out) and threw in the grass-fed ground beef. Holy cow! It worked. They did put a sticker on the container though... So, a little bit of garbage. 

Next, Rich walked over to the bulk section equipped this time with a plastic Tupperware container from home. Straight to the big red machine that crushes fresh peanuts for the best peanut butter ever.

At the check-out register the cashier asked Rich how much the container alone weighed. Not sure, she deducted a reasonable amount of ounces so we was only charged for the peanut butter. She said next time to get the container weighed on the way in.

I'm starting to think that other people do this too. How wonderful. 

They say women particularly enjoy watching their men do housework like vacuuming, cleaning, dishes, etc. Well, coming home after a package-less shopping trip sure works for me. (although dishes are good too). Now time for some homemade pancakes and real maple syrup from the bulk section filled into a reusable jug. After this meal, we will have no more eggs. It will soon be time to seek out some real chickens. 

I was dying for some juice, after a day in the cubicle breathing in god-knows what, so I had to buy some carrots. 

I began the adventure at Vitamin Cottage on Wadsworth and 72nd in Arvada, Colorado - a sprawling hell hole more or less. It was actually pretty easy. I just got some produce - baby potatoes, radishes, carrots, baby bok choy, cantelope, apples, and some parsley. Vitamin Cottage sells their bulk items in pre-packaged heavy duty plastic bags, so i couldn't get any bulk - big juicy organic raisins were calling me - but no go. 

I got to the register and thought it would be cool to get a picture of the cashier scanning my free-breathing food, both of them, together, open to the elements as nature intended. I told her I was doing this 30-day blog and asked if she would mind. After a moment, she decided she had to call a supervisor, who also had to call a supervisor. I finally go the go-ahead but wasn't allowed to capture the vitamin cottage logo, which lives on the smocks at chest level. See picture above. I did get some genuine Vitamin Cottage Cashier hands in the picture though. 

I never got around to the juice, but when I got home, I had a few spoonfuls of leftover room-temperature sticky rice and salty beans that I had made the night before to hold me over until I could make dinner. Then I washed the lettuce, spun it and put the salad in the spinner into the fridge for easy access throughout the week. I also washed the radishes, ate one, and put in bowl in the fridge.

I decided to make pasta from unbleached organic white flour, crushed green pepper corns, an egg, salt and some water. I threw the rest of the ingredients into a pot to simmer and dinner was served! I cooked the sausage and veggies in water since I haven't dealt yet with non-packaged oils. I did have some bacon fat in a jar in the fridge but decided against it for this time.

Today I finished preparing the kitchen for 30-days without packaged food. Raisin bran-like cereal, instant quinoa, numerous power bars, generic gummy bears, a tub of natural hot fudge sauce. They have all made their way into the donation bag. 

A few things I kept, like organic non-dairy hot cocoa mix, multi grain pancake mix, a few cans of beans even though the plastic lining on the inside of the cans bothers me. I stored them in a box and put it above the refrigerator. They will keep watch on the kitchen-honesty of the next month. 

The bulk items on the shelves are foods that were already in the house. They were brought home in plastic bags, but since we already had them, we decided to just go with it. For all future bulk items, we will have to somehow convince the store to allow us to bring our own containers. 

On the shelves are mung beans, adzuki beans, lentils, rice, bulgar, nuts, flour, and various kinds of rice. Basically the only processing these foods have seen is that the hulls have been removed. The flour was also ground up. Since they are so minimally processed, they fit within the rules for no packaged foods even though we brought them home in unnecessary plastic bags. We will try to solve this problem throughout the month and see what options we have for transporting fine grained bulk items.