Yesterday I shared how the only food among what I normally eat my doctor says I can eat for a week before my colonoscopy is tofu.

Normally my coop sells tofu unpackaged that I can take home in containers I bring. It turns out they were out of stock, with the next shipment expected next Thursday. Chinatown wasn’t far, so I walked there. Plenty of tofu for sale, but none of the half-dozen stores I checked carried it in bulk.

I went back and forth on my options. One was to revert to water only for about a week, two days longer than I’ve gone with only water before. Another was to go back tomorrow and check other stores. Another was to check another neighborhood that might sell bulk tofu, like Koreatown.

My mind came up with all the rationalizations and justifications all of our minds do:

“Just buy it,”

“you did the best you could,”

“everyone else does it,”

“you can put the packaging in the recycling,”

“what else can you do?”

“Why make such a big deal about it?”

Etc and so on

Still, I knew that buying plastic meant funding hurting people.

In the end, I bought packaged tofu, my second packaged food item this year. I felt defeated. I can’t wait for when I can go into a store and buy any food for sale without packaging or being shipped far or otherwise hurting people.

I bought the biggest container I found, three kilograms, to minimize the amount of plastic per tofu and the amount I was funding creating future plastic.

It’s evening and dark, so I’ll take a picture of the container in the morning and post it here.

EDIT: Here’s the giant container of 3 kg / almost 7 pounds of tofu:

• ← What I learned about my diet and fiber from a colonoscopy
• Why changing culture to sustainable must come first, only then pursue efficiency, technology, and laws. →