Enjoy your food without adding to the garbage: Ideas from Taiwan
How does one avoid packaging and other waste in a system which provides food and drinks for immediate consumption at all hours of the day, made possible by one-way containers, plastic or bamboo cutlery, and plastic bags? In Taiwan, traditional practices and the creative minds of a growing number of people demonstrate that convenient food and drinks don’t have to come at the expense of the environment.
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| Zongzi wrapped in leaves waiting to be devoured |
Taiwan’s eating and drinking culture
Eating out in Taiwan can be a lot of fun. The variety of different kinds of snacks offered by street stalls is impressive. Fancy some stinky fermented tofu, steamed cabbage bun, or a fried scallion pancake? I’m starting to feel quite hungry just writing about it. While street stalls can be found almost anywhere, night markets are like street food festivals that happens all year round. Going from stall to stall and trying different snacks at a night-market is more or less the culinary equivalent of a pub-crawl, where you end up with food coma instead of a hangover. |
| A night market in Taipei |
Fast and tasty food can also be had at the many small restaurants which emphasise taste and low prices over fancy decor. Dumplings, noodles with sauce or in soup, rice with all kinds of seasonings, and a huge varieties of tofu or vegetables are some of the most typical choices if you are vegetarian. Eat-in or take away - the choice is yours.
If you need food quickly and don’t mind that it’s not freshly prepared, convenience stores have you covered. Chains such as 7-11 and Familiy Mart offer a mind-boggling selection of ready-to-eat food and drinks. In addition to classics of Taiwanese and Chinese cuisine, the ‘menu’ includes everything from Italian pasta to Japanese onigiri.
Taiwan’s most popular beverage is arguably “milk tea”. For many, getting a milk tea to-go from a Bubble Tea shop is part of their daily routine. While the classic iced black tea with milk and tapioca “pearls” is still the best-seller, choices include all kinds of other varieties of tea mixed with milk, fruit juice, and other kinds of sweets. On a hot summer day, of which there are many in Taiwan, freshly pressed juices from street vendors complete the choice of available refreshments.
Taiwan has a convenience problem
Such an array of food and drink choices sounds pretty amazing, so why the fuss about waste? Whether from a convenience store, street vendor, or restaurant: food and beverage vendors provide all the tools you need to transport and consume their products in disposable form. While there are positive examples like Ningxia Night Market, where stall owners collectively offer reusable cutlery, other vendors rely entirely on disposable utensils and packaging.5 billion pairs of chopsticks are trashed each year
As a result, an estimated 5 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks, 4.6 billion plastic bottles, 150 million cups, 18 billion plastic bags (not all of which are necessarily related to food and drinks) are trashed each year. [1][2]Love the food, beat the waste
Even among milk teas and soups wrapped in plastic bags dangling from scooter handle-bars, piles of disposable bowls in front of restaurants, to-go cups on the tables of cafés, there is an avant-garde who refuse to accept the rule of the garbage-producing machine of ultimate convenience. Using traditional practices and new ideas on how to avoid waste, a growing number of people demonstrate that the full range of epicurean delights can be enjoyed without contributing to the growing piles of garbage.Learn from your grandparents
While there’s a lot of new trends making the rounds, I would like to highlight that there is also “generational wisdom”, based on renewable and reusable materials, which provide awesome low tech solutions to this problem.For example, check out the packaging of the awesomely delicacious zongzi (the sticky rice dumplings hanging from strings at the beginning of the page): they are prepared and wrapped in leaves of plants such as bamboo. This idea can be applied to many more snacks as the awesome people from Pick Food Up demonstrate.
Bento boxes are packed lunches which provide a nutritious variety of vegetables or meat with rice. For a long time they were served in pretty little metal lunch boxes. Whether you prepare food for your bento box at home or buy it in a restaurant, a vintage metal box is the stylish way to go! Ask your grandparents if they still have one or check at your local used goods shop. Using a 2nd hand box also saves material and energy resources.
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| Vintage lunch box |
Substituting garbage with stylish little helpers
As more and more people try to reduce packaging waste, new products and DIY solutions are emerging to fit Taiwan’s food and drink culture.In Taiwan you can never be completely safe from food stalls which pop up right in front of you and tempt you with tasty savory and sweet snacks. Don’t resist the temptation! Just carry a reusable snack pouch or bag. They come in stylish designs and help you avoid paper and plastic bags with every snack you eat. The small washable pouches come in different varieties. Some are simply made of cloth which works perfectly for solid snacks. Others are made from materials that can keep the grease off your hands in case you like snacks with a sauce.
好日子 agooday's Pockeat takes the idea of the snack pouch a step further by offering a solution that is scaleable to your needs. The waterproof bags are closed by rolling up the opening, thereby saving extra space. Pockeat doubles as a container for most lunch box, takeaway, or snack needs. While not a completely original idea (a similar product is for example offered by Rolleat), the crowdfunding campaign of Pockeat in Taiwan has been hugely successful, indicating that the issue of waste reduction is entering the consciousness of a growing number of consumers. I am sure the available designs have played a substantial role in convincing crowd-investors to jump on the zero waste train. If you would like to see Pockeat in action: check out how it is used for street food or even a bowl of noodles in this demo video.
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| A prototype of Pockeat displayed on a market to celebrate Earth Day 2017 |
Glass and metal straws, as an alternative to plastic straws, have become increasingly popular over the past couple of years. Many use straws on a daily basis, since the experience of drinking bubble tea is nearly inseparably from straws because they are necessary for sucking up those infamous tapioca pearls. So if you find yourself slurping away every day, consider getting a reusable straw. They even come with fitted straw-brushes.
The only purpose of many plastic bags before ending up in a garbage bin is holding one cup of milk tea. A group of students at National Taiwan University promotes DIY carriers made of string as a substitute for plastic bags. In this video they demonstrate that their string carrier holds a cup just as tight as plastic bag. My suggestion for the big Bubble Tea chains: be progressive and copy the idea!
The hidden potential from your cupboard
In many instances it is not even necessary to get a new product in order to avoid waste. Some great tools might be waiting in your cupboard or a dark drawer to be put to use. In Taiwan, the useful tools that many already own are refillable water bottles, insulated cups, food containers, shopping bags, and travel sets of chopsticks and spoons. |
| My equipment for a waste-free day |
Thermos cups are popular for brewing your own tea on the go. A refillable bottle is the perfect companion for making good use of the drinking fountains that can be found in most schools, offices, train stations, etc. .... If more widely applied thermos cups and water bottles can also serve as an alternative to to-go cups. The waste of bamboo chopsticks is an issue that already more people are aware of. Therefore, many have a travel set with a pair chopsticks and a spoon. I was given a set myself on my first day of University in Taiwan. Let's unleash the potential of our cupboards and avoid waste by using these unsung heroes more often.
Changing your habits is easier when you do it in a group #不塑之客
If you would like to get more impressions from Taiwan check out this great facebook group with presently more than 50.000 members that exchange ideas and post photos of their zero waste experiences. You can also use #不塑之客 to find further examples or to share your photos.Thanks for sticking with me until the end of this article. I hope I was able to present a new perspective on sustainable lifestlyes to you. I am really happy to have come across all these ideas and practices in Taiwan. No matter if I am in Taiwan or live in another country, they will provide good solutions for avoiding waste.
Do you find the ideas from the article useful? What are your own waste-free eating-out experiences? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. I am looking forward to read about your insights.
Julian
Some further interesting links related to the topic:
- Short movie clip with Taipei’s Mayor promoting reusable cutlery and dishes
- Illustrations on (avoiding) waste by the Earthday Taiwan network
- Hanna's posts on The Sustainery about her zero waste journey.
using the natural shell/skin of things for example cutting an avocado in a clever way that you can just stick one half of the shell partly inside the other, or cutting a peace out of the middle of an onion that way you can press both side against eath other and just store it like this, protected by its own skin
ReplyDeleteah and a little glass container with a nice sock keeps the tea hot pretty long and serves at the same time as a protection against breaking the glass
ReplyDeleteI like your ideas. They make use of available resources in an effective way.
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