grocery bags and the apocalypse

Okay... a little extreme, I know, except...

I have this eerie vision in my head that morphs that 'I Am Legend ' shot of the deer running through the streets of post-apocalypse NYC into a shot of Nashville's Broadway with millions of plastic bags scudding along the empty lanes down into the river. I really must stop watching TV so much.

Anyway, on Monday I went to Whole Foods, and I had once again forgotten my reusable Ikea bag. Problem is, it's so huge that it really doesn't work for my little one-person, two-or-three-meals trips to the grocery. I joked with the checkout girl that in addition to wanting paper bags, I'd take a healthy dose of guilt to go along with them. Sadly, Whole Foods does not stock guilt, but luckily I had my own to pull out. So, upon my return home, I took a few minutes out of my mad dash to do two weeks worth of laundry to sit down and sew together the bottoms of some of my old tank tops (during which I saw the preview for I Am Legend and thus we've come full circle).

I'm going to use these as reusable grocery sacks. I only made two since I want to try them out before sewing up the bottoms of what could conceivably be wearable shirts... and since I rarely use more than two bags at the grocery anyway, this should be a good start. I know I'll need to sew up more, though, given my propensity to completely forget to take my own bags. I'll start with these two and then stock up the Prius with 10 or so.

Good thing I did that, because my lovely Aunt Louise sent a site called One Bag At A Time. Check out their breakdown of the life of a grocery sack! Holy moly!

That's the sort of stuff we need! Hard numbers to calculate impact! That's why I'm so excited about the new curriculum at Warren Wilson (I swear I'll post this next) - maybe we can figure out how to communicate these metrics (look at me with my shiny corporate lingo!) to broad audiences!