I was pretty excited to try making those chickpeas from the dehydrated form. Yesterday, I looked up how to make them, so I knew to start soaking them last night.
This morning, I peered into the bowl and they had expanded about 3x their size! The recipe calls for a lot, but not this much. Looks like I’ll just be having a lot of this Mediterranean salad for lunch, since I don’t think the chickpeas will last much longer than a week in the fridge. There’s almost no room in my freezer, since I’m sharing it with six other girls in my house.
It wasn’t until about 9pm I went grocery shopping with my roommate because she had gone on a short trip to Chicago for the weekend. Instead of Kroger like usual, we went to Meijer in hopes of finding more food due to COVID-19. To my dismay, Meijer was lacking in the produce section. “I can’t buy anything,” I complained to my roommate. Meijer tends to sell more items in bulk, so they have a lot of packaging around their fruits and vegetables.
They even had plastic wrap around individual heads of broccoli! I had never seen that before, but I wonder if some packaging on all this food is just meant to keep the food clean, which is probably beneficial given the current situation. Quite a bit of food was gone too, so I bought as much as I could there without any packaging. Tomorrow I’ll have to go to the store for the third time to get the rest of my ingredients though. I’ve already come so far in the recipe that I’m not going to change it, and sweet potatoes, onions, and broccoli are pretty typical ingredients for any recipe. I’m a little annoyed, but I understand most of these challenges are not associated with buying zero waste.
Here's what I purchased at Meijer.
Like last week, these plastic bags for the apples and cilantro are the same ones that I've been reusing since before the challenge began. 
Luckily I had all the ingredients for the Mediterranean chickpea salad, so later that evening I meal prepped the salad to take as a lunch tomorrow. It took about an hour, including cleanup, probably because all of the chopping needed for the vegetables. I tasted it at the end, and I liked it!
After cooking, I found this C&EN article that had an answer to the plastic wrapped broccoli. Food is often wrapped in plastic to protect and extend its shelf life, sometimes preventing food waste, but comes at the cost of the plastic retaining only 5% of its value due to low collection rates and few other usages. This quote really stood out to me because I think it captures the central problem with plastic:
“You have this highly engineered package that is used for maybe a few weeks, and then it sits for hundreds of years at a landfill.”
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