Waste Management

So Thursday is grocery shopping night around these parts, and The Girl and I spent yesterday evening loading up on supplies.

Have I mentioned that I have to send each child a snack from home for the "Health Break" at school each day? Have I also mentioned that said snack can consist of anything from a long list of fruits and vegetables? Oh, and cheese and yogurt. No nuts (yay for one less communal eating experience about which to worry), no bread products, nothing processed. Just fruits and vegetables and cheese and yogurt.

It isn't as easy as it sounds, as my kids aren't huge fans of getting their 5-10 a day. In the interest of expanding our possibilities, we checked out the dried fruit section yesterday, and the following offering gave me pause:

Single serving prunes.

Now tell me, what exactly is the target market for these? Old ladies who like to keep a little something in their purse for regularity but who get tired of the prunes in the baggie clumping together? Healthful and hygenic cubicle dwellers who want to offer something better for their co-workers' bodies than candy but who dread the thought of someone thrusting a dirty, germy hand into a communal bowl of M&M's**?

Beyond the mental incongruity of someone handing one of these to a child who thinks he's getting a LifeSaver, I must register my disapproval of putting Nature's candy into a wrapper like this. The level of excess packaging in this product rivals those fruits in 7-11 subjected to the cello-wrap-styrofoam-treatment - Hello?! An apple already has a wrapper. It's called a peel.

So these get a big thumbs-down from me for many reasons. I'd better not see you reaching into your purses and crinkling one of these bad boys open in church on Sunday....


**Someone very close to me (who shall remain nameless, to protect his innocence) keeps on his desk a bowlful of candies with a little tongs to prevent exactly this type of bacterial perfect storm. Personally, I just keep individually-wrapped Jolly Ranchers. Somehow it's different when it's prunes.