Sep 8, 2023 4 min read

More than once, my trip to get groceries has been interrupted by a U-turn, to return home to get the most important parts of shopping – and I’m not talking about my wallet.

It is the market bags, my reusable sacks that allow me to haul all the things home without creating a sea of light-blue plastic on the kitchen counter. My market bags stay hanging on the back doorknob, folded and stuffed into one another like Russian dolls, ready for my trip.

My favorite is the rough burlap sack with FEED emblazoned on it. It’s the one I use for heavy and cold things, because it has a sturdy square bottom. When I’m at the checkout, I’ll ask the helper to “pack it heavy” and he never disappoints. Sometimes I have to thin the herd a bit in order to lift it from the shopping cart to my car.

The other sacks are coated papery things that fall apart after about a dozen uses, but I just restock the next time I’m out and about.

Grocery stores are headed away from single-use plastic bags, in a transition aimed at helping the environment. Plastic production causes fuel emission, and the bags create litter on land and in the oceans that will take an eternity to biodegrade. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a swirl of ocean debris twice the size of Texas, and much of it is plastic bags.

Plastic is cheaper than paper, and so stores made the switch in the 1970s and 1980s. Around that time, I had an after-school job bagging groceries for Giant Eagle. There was a system to it: four cans or heavy bottles in the four corners at the bottom of the bag. Fill in the rest of the bag with other things. Always put the eggs on top, and no soapy things go in with the food.

I developed good biceps from lifting those bags into the carts, but I also went home with scrapes along my forearms from sliding my hands into the folded bags to open them, hundreds of bags every day.

Now, I’ll occasionally ask for a paper bag when I’m checking out, just so I have one at home should I need it. At Trader Joe’s, the nice workers thank you if you bring your own bags, and then they let you enter a raffle for a gift card. I’m still waiting.

A friend recently told me that much of being an adult is about management of our stuff. That includes finding lids for plastic containers and locating the other shoe in the mess at the bottom of the closet.

And for me, it’s keeping track of my shopping sacks. The FEED one wasn’t inexpensive, but when an ad for it popped onto my Facebook page, I stared at it for a long time, imagining all the ways its sturdy burlap would help me be a more efficient hunter-gatherer.

I’d like to think I buy the reusable bags because I want to help the environment. While that’s somewhat true, my reasons are more practical. Two heavy bags of food are easier to haul from the car to the house than 15 flimsy plastic bags. How did I manage that for all those years when I was shopping for a whole family, back when my bimonthly grocery run always ended with about five trips from the car to the house, with a few blue bags slung over my elbows, cutting off my circulation.

Now I do my shopping and drive home with two sacks in the back seat carrying all I’ll need for a couple of weeks, a reminder of how times are changing – for the world and for me.