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Little rant about little bags

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High Function ASD2
V.I.P Member
I'm single. When I do my shopping I break all my food up in to single serves and freeze it. I eat far better than most people and still live very cheaply doing this. I buy chicken schnitzels in bulk and freeze them as individuals. I split sausages up in to pairs and freeze them. Everything in to tiny little one person freezer bags.

Except now they've stopped production of the little itty bitty freezer bags and I don't understand why. In this modern age more people than ever are living by themselves and need to be able to store food in appropriate sized servings. Why can't we get the little bags any more?

Yes I now use bigger bags, what about pollution and wasteful societies? Or maybe it's just my autism and the longing for the fulfillment of old habits, I want the little itty bitty freezer bags back again.

P.S. I'm writing this while packaging up the next month's worth of meat so it's also very topical. Feel free to comment. :)
 
Has Australia banned the use of single-use bags? The only viable alternative would be small plastic containers for food, but they take up more space and aren't so convenient. Or wrap them in cling film, then put all the individual packs into a larger bag.
 
Progster said:
Has Australia banned the use of single-use bags?
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Not yet but it's coming.

The old fashioned way was to wrap things in greaseproof paper before freezing them. (waxed paper) But that goes hard and brittle when frozen and it breathes, meaning that your food dries out in the freezer.

Ban plastic toys and ban the use of plastics in cars, but let us keep our freezer bags. They're an important part of life.
 
Change is inevitable, but it doesn't mean we always have to welcome it with open arms.

Personally I see the point that single use of the over-use of plastic can be detrimental to the environment and I'm trying to cut down on plastic use. I take reusable bags to the supermarket, and reuse the smaller bags one gets for fruit and veg, or choose paper ones instead. I do use freezer bags, though. Here, they banned plastic drink straws and knives and forks, but it's a token 'greenwashing' gesture really, these are such a small part of all the plastic used for wrapping and other uses.

Could you use cling film (membrane) instead?
 
Outdated said:
I'm single. When I do my shopping I break all my food up in to single serves and freeze it. I eat far better than most people and still live very cheaply doing this. I buy chicken schnitzels in bulk and freeze them as individuals. I split sausages up in to pairs and freeze them. Everything in to tiny little one person freezer bags.

Except now they've stopped production of the little itty bitty freezer bags and I don't understand why. In this modern age more people than ever are living by themselves and need to be able to store food in appropriate sized servings. Why can't we get the little bags any more?

Yes I now use bigger bags, what about pollution and wasteful societies? Or maybe it's just my autism and the longing for the fulfillment of old habits, I want the little itty bitty freezer bags back again.

P.S. I'm writing this while packaging up the next month's worth of meat so it's also very topical. Feel free to comment. :)
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Are sandwich bags an option?

I think that you can find recycled bags in the internet or maybe you can buy them in Amazon!
 
It’s hard to find the small freezer bags where I live too. Especially the Ziplock ones. Super frustrating.
 
Hey, I could be the middleman, shipping dollar store sandwich baggies to Australia! You pay shipping, and I wouldn't mind sending some over.
 
I noticed mainstream markets often do not have the common items you would naturally expect and you often need to buy custom made items. Like society has a one-size-fits-all approach to items to maximize profits.

Outdated said:
Not yet but it's coming.

The old fashioned way was to wrap things in greaseproof paper before freezing them. (waxed paper) But that goes hard and brittle when frozen and it breathes, meaning that your food dries out in the freezer.

Ban plastic toys and ban the use of plastics in cars, but let us keep our freezer bags. They're an important part of life.
Click to expand...
First of all I do not at all agree with the use of the term "plastic". Most things which society calls "plastic" are not plastic at all, and undergo no plastic deformation before catastrophic failure. So, its bad enough that society calls "plastic" that which is not plastic, but also there are many different kinds of plastic, a small subsection of which are supposedly eco-friendly, such as PLA filament. Instead of calling as "plastic", they should be called "polymers".

And saran wrap might not be replaceable with eco-friendly alternatives, so its back to the stone-age for food storage? But the damage can be minimized by swapping materials for eco-friendly whenever possible. For example, we don't need polymer boxes, we can use cardboard or mushroom packaging. And we can use wooden or eco-friendly cellulose based "plastic" straws. People are hyping up mushrooms as the next miracle material, yet I see no progress being made on it being presented in IRL stores.
 
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I've seen these vacuum pack machines in Lidl every now and then. Rather than bags it uses a roll of two layer plastic and it seals one end using heat and then once you've sucked the air out it heat seals the other end.

I have thought about buying one, but then wonder if it's a bit extravagant when we have little bags a plenty right now in the UK. This may change though soon.

I wonder if something like the vacuum sealing machine might be worth getting in your situation? It could be potentially better as every bit of food will have made to measure packaging. I guess this would be a bit of an investment as apposed to using freezer bags. The only other thing I can think of is perhaps Amazon sell little bags in bulk so you can stock up?
 
I still don't understand why we haven't gone back to using cellulose fibre - cellophane, cellotape, etc. It's made from farm waste, corn husks and stalks etc. It can have many of the same properties as plastic, you can make it stiff and brittle or soft and supple.

Unlike plastic you can also cook it, oven bags are made of cellophane.

When it comes to recycling we did far more and did it far more efficiently back in the 70s. Today's ideas of recycling get called "greenwashing", I call it commercial self aggrandisment and masturbation.
 
A few years ago there were some scandals here in the UK when it turned out a lot of local authorities were providing recycling bins that had strict sorting requirements or they wouldn't collect them. It turned out that despite people diligently sorting their waste to be recycled, all that happened was that it went straight to landfill, or got shipped to a developing nation to be stacked up and burned. I wouldn't be surprised if it was still happening now.
 
Yep. Like the rort of recycling paper back in the 90s. As a printer I was literally producing scrap paper on an industrial scale. To satisfy the law we had to separate all of our waste but the people collecting it all told us that we didn't have to be too fussy about that because it was all going in to the same hole in the ground anyway.

Paper companies had their backs to the wall warehousing recyclable paper but no one wanted to buy recycled paper.
 
I portion things out and freeze them as well. I use glass containers with seal/ snap on lids for bigger stuff and reuseable silicone zip- seal Stasher bags for small stuff. It is an investment to get all the containers in the beginning, but you can wash and re-use them for years. Saves money in the long run and less waste.
 
I've been using the vacuum sealer for several years now. I grow my own fruits and veggies (mangoes and pineapples, anyone?) and my husband is a bow hunter so we do product some of our own food and it needs to be frozen.

I started with a cheap one (maybe $79?) to see if we would really use it. We use it so much we finally got a new more expensive one that tolerates the volume we put it through.
 
WhitewaterWoman said:
..... so we do product some of our own food and it needs to be frozen.
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Something I learned from when I was living in the bush but applies just the same in city life as well. Only doing a large shop every month instead of buying a few bits and pieces every few days is a much cheaper way to live. A lot more convenient too, I've always got something good to eat on hand.
 
Freezer bags and sandwich bags are two different things. Sandwich bags are thinner than freezer bags and don't protect the food from freezer burn as well as a freezer bag does.
 
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