But cloth bags won’t keep moisture inside like plastic will, so foods may dry out more over time. In our tests, we didn’t notice much of a difference between cloth bags and a resealable plastic storage bag when it came to keeping foods like carrots, cilantro, and lettuce fresh for four days. You could also simply purchase many produce items, from cucumbers to apples to beets, unbagged. She embraces a simple approach to storing food, placing items like an apple cut-side down on a plate or covering a bowl of pudding with another bowl. Erin Boyle, author of the blog Reading My Tea Leaves, repurposes drawstring bags that sometimes come with clothing, bedding, or jewelry purchases to transport produce and bulk goods from the store. “I don’t think that the solution is going home, tossing everything that you have that’s disposable, and replacing it with fancy jars or metal containers,” she said. “Everyone has things at home they can reuse, whether that’s an old pickle jar or even the same Ziploc-use it until you can no longer use it,” she told me over coffee at a bar next to her store where she often purchases sandwiches-to-go on plates that she later returns. Katerina Bogatireva, owner of the package-free store Precycle in Brooklyn, New York, insists that you shouldn’t have to pay for minimalism. Usually, you can use what you already have. Let’s be clear: You don’t have to buy more things in order to avoid single-use plastics. I also spoke with writer Erin Boyle, author of the blog Reading My Tea Leaves and the book Simple Matters, who writes about easy and sustainable living practices. To learn about the best use cases for items like beeswax wraps and reusable produce bags, I talked to cheesemonger Carol Johnson, owner of Monger’s Palate in Brooklyn, New York, and Corey Rateau, a senior category manager at Good Eggs, a grocery-delivery service based in San Francisco. To learn more about what makes a good reusable product, I interviewed two leaders of the zero-waste movement who have their own stores: Katerina Bogatireva, the founder of the package-free store Precycle, and Lauren Singer, blogger at Trash Is for Tossers and founder of the store Package Free.
Then I sifted through dozens of seemingly indistinguishable products to find the best options.
#PYREX REPLACEMENT LIDS FREE#
I spent hours reading reviews of reusable kitchen products on sites including Bon Appétit, The Kitchn, The Strategist, and Apartment Therapy, and on the blogs Going Zero Waste and My Plastic Free Life. I’m a writer on the Wirecutter kitchen team who has covered everything from reusable straws to hand mixers.