We really really really encourage you to buy food and eat it right away. However, if you must get a head of lettuce and stretch it out a week, we encourage use of Biobags. These bags allow the food to breathe, keeping food fresh for longer periods. And, since they're made out of corn, they're biodegradable. Can't say the same for plastic, now can you?
We first saw these at our neighborhood natural foods store, Lifethyme, and have since seen them at Whole Foods as well. Treehugger did a little review of the bags a while back, which is where we learned you can now order the company's full line of bags (food scrap, trash, pet waste...) online at Drugstore.com.
So now when you forget about that head of lettuce for longer than even the Biobag can preserve it, you can just toss the whole thing into your compost (or second choice, trash bin) guilt-free.
I am terribly, terribly happy to hear about these.
Actually corn and corn by products have been used in plastic for years now (Dow uses corn). You should be aware that while petroleum production has numerous environmental and social ills associated with it, so does corn growing. Government corn subsidies have had a terrible impact on the American diet, small farms, and depletion of topsoil, plus the amount of water and pesticides used to grow corn is just reprehensible. All together, I'm not really sure that this is a marked improvement over plastic. Similar to the way people buy organic produce from Whole Foods, thinking I'm contributing to reduced use of bad chemicals, but in fact most of those items are shipped across the continent (or even from Latin America) using more fossil fuels than carrots grown a state away and thus producing more environmental pollution. Such a predicament.
Biobags also makes a composter - the MaxAir, which you line with the bags. Makes composting much more pleasant - just take the bag out and toss on the pile. They claim that the air holes keep from smelling and they're pretty much right. You can certainly leave it under the sink for a couple days.
They rated these and other produce freshness methods in (I think) Shape magazine. If I can remember, I will look and post results. These did decently, but didn't rank as high as other methods.
Szig, I agree we need to make a bigger effort to grow corn in a more concious way, however this is a renewable resource, and in my opinion a renewable resource is always better than a non-renewable one such as petroleum. The way I see going green is that you can make yourself absolutely bonkers trying to figure out which is worse and where everything comes from, if it's really bad or not that bad. You can hike up to the woods and live like a bear, or we can slowly work to raise our consciousness and the consciousness of our peers. I think bioplastic is a tremendous step in the right direction.
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