Recipe of the Month: Vegan Caprese Salad

As part of our efforts to reduce our dairy consumption, Brian and I have bought almost no cheese for the past several months. Instead, we've experimented with various nondairy cheeses, as well as substituting other ingredients in recipes that call for cheese. We successfully replaced the parmesan in this Arugula and Mushroom Pasta with a mixture of salt and nutritional yeast, and we've ditched the cheese in our favorite burrito recipe from The Clueless Vegetarian in favor of sliced avocado, which provided a similarly creamy texture without the dairy.

Earlier this month, however, we finally gave in and bought a pound of shredded mozzarella at Aldi. The reason: the tomatoes and peppers in the garden were growing ripe, which meant that it was the perfect time of year to make our favorite pasta dish, pasta à la Caprese. And pasta à la Caprese simply isn't the same without the melting mozzarella cheese commingling with the warm pasta and zesty fresh tomato sauce. No substitute we've found could really produce the same effect.

So we made one batch of pasta à la Caprese, cheese and all, and saved the rest of the cheese for a second batch later in the summer. But I found myself thinking that if we eat this fabulous pasta as often as we'd like to while the tomato crop lasts, we'll be going through quite a lot of cheese. So if we really want to keep our dairy consumption down, we'll have to either forego our favorite pasta or figure out some way to make it cheese-free.

To that end, I typed "vegan Caprese" into Google. And while I didn't find any suggestions for a vegan version of pasta à la Caprese, I did find several recipes for vegan versions of Caprese salad, typically using some sort of seasoned tofu in place of the sliced mozzarella. This sounded like an intriguing idea, so I selected the easiest-looking recipe, from Whole Foods, and we gave it a whirl this Friday.

The preparation for this is pretty simple, but it has a long lead time. First, you slice your block of tofu into thin slices and sprinkle them with balsamic vinegar and salt. (The recipe calls for white balsamic vinegar, but we weren't about to buy a whole bottle of that just to use two tablespoons in this recipe, so we used regular.) Then you lay them out on a baking sheet and then let them sit uncovered in the fridge for at least eight hours. This allows them to dry out and absorb the flavor of the marinade.

Brian had taken the day off on Friday, so he set up the tofu in the morning and then turned it into Caprese salad in the evening. This part of the recipe is pretty quick: just add slices of fresh tomato and basil leaves to the tofu slices. You're supposed to arrange it all in layers on a serving platter, but since we had so little of it, Brian just left the tofu slices on the rack and added tomato and basil on top. He also decided to leave the balsamic vinegar on the side, so we could sprinkle it on to taste, rather than dressing the entire dish with it. So we just had individual slices of tofu, topped with basil and tomato, and a loaf of Italian bread from the local bakery to go with it.

And the result was...almost like Caprese salad. The texture of the tofu, after eight hours of curing, seemed almost exactly right to me: soft, but not squishy. My teeth sank into it just as they would into a slice of real mozzarella. But the flavor wasn't quite there. Tofu, of course, has no real flavor of its own, but it readily absorbs the flavor of anything you soak it in, which in this case meant that it tasted mainly of balsamic vinegar. And to my taste buds, balsamic-soaked tofu does not at all have the same flavor as a salty, creamy, ever-so-faintly tangy mozzarella cheese. Brian said underneath the balsamic, he couldn't really tell the difference, but to me it was noticeable.

However, I do think it wouldn't take that much tweaking to the recipe to give the tofu a more mozzarella-like flavor. I think the main problem was that it hadn't absorbed much salt, so it didn't have the saltiness of mozzarella. My idea would be to drizzle the tofu not with vinegar and just a sprinkle of salt, but with a salty brine that would have the full eight hours to soak in. You could add just a touch of vinegar to give it the appropriate tang, or possibly something like a dash of liquid aminos or a touch of the nutritional yeast. Then you could save the balsamic for sprinkling on at the very end of the process. (In fact, that seems to be the basic approach used in this vegan Caprese salad recipe from PBS. It's similar to the Whole Foods one, but it substitutes milder lemon juice for the balsamic vinegar and uses only half as much, while tripling the amount of salt. So maybe we'll just try that one next time.)

Overall, I think we've found a reasonable substitute for mozzarella that works very well in a Caprese salad. Unfortunately, though, this doesn't really bring us any closer to having a good substitute for our pasta à la Caprese recipe. The tofu has the right texture and almost the right flavor—but it doesn't melt. And the melting of the cheese amongst the pasta and tomatoes is pretty much the cornerstone of the dish.

So if we want to get serious about veganizing our favorite pasta, I guess we'll have to ramp up our search for a vegan cheese substitute—commercial or homemade. Possibly the DIY recipe from It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken would work well for this application, since the amount it makes—about two cups' worth—is just right for a batch of pasta à la Caprese. So the continuing influx of beautiful, ripe tomatoes could be just the impetus we need to finally give this recipe a try.

Money Crashers: What Is “Medicare for All”

Back before Obamacare was enacted, I used to worry about how Brian and I would ever manage to pay for health care if Brian were to lose his job. As a freelancer, I didn't have access to a workplace health plan, and New Jersey, where we live, was one of the most expensive places in the country to buy private health insurance. (That's because it was also one of the few states that required insurers to cover preexisting conditions before Obamacare was passed.) I'd checked the cost of private plans on a comparison site called ehealthinsurance.com, and the cheapest plan I could find that would put any sort of limit on our out-of-pocket costs—which is, after all, what health insurance is for—was about $1,000 a month. With just my freelance earnings to support us, that would have eaten up about a third of our gross income.

With the passage of the ACA, all that worry fell away from my shoulders. For the first time ever, I knew that I'd be able to manage the cost of health care for both of us if I ever became the sole breadwinner. I could even start spinning plans for an early retirement, with both of us living off our investment income and pursuing all those projects we'd never had time for during our working years. But of course, no sooner was the ACA passed than Republicans began threatening to repeal it—and while they haven't managed to do this in the legislature, they may yet succeed in taking it down through the courts. So at any moment, this security could be snatched away from us yet again.

Now, as we head into the 2020 election season, several left-leaning Democrats are making noises about a way to solve this problem once and for all: Medicare for All. This is essentially a new (and more popular) name for the health-care system once known as single-payer. It would expand Medicare to cover every single American (with a few exceptions, such as veterans, who would keep the system they have now) and scrap private health insurance completely. And, naturally, Republicans, who were already denouncing the patchy coverage provided by Obamacare as rampant socialism, are screaming in an even higher key about this new plan.

In my latest Money Crashers article, I attempt to cut through the shouting and provide some facts about what Medicare for All really means: what it would cover, what it would cost, and how it would affect different groups of people. I also provide some background on what's wrong with the health-care system we have now, and how it compares with some systems in other countries, such as Britain and Canada. And finally, I talk about some alternative plans that have been proposed (so far, only by Democrats) to expand health coverage in a less disruptive way.

What Is “Medicare for All” – Features, Costs, Pros & Cons

Freecycle etiquette

Early this month, Brian took advantage of the time off he had for the holiday weekend to do a little cleanup in the laundry room/workshop. Though you may not be able to tell it from the picture, he actually got rid of quite a lot of stuff, sending some to the trash and some upstairs for me to list on Freecycle.

So over the past few weeks, I've made several Freecycle posts and dealt with several different Freecyclers, and the experience has reminded me of something I've thought for a while: there really ought to be a code of etiquette for dealing with people on Freecycle. It might seem like the rules of polite behavior on Freecycle are pretty much the same as they are anywhere else and shouldn't need explaining—but apparently they do, since so many people violate them all the time.

Since it appears that Miss Manners has somehow managed to overlook this particular area, I guess it falls to me to fill in the gap. So here are my proposed Rules of Freecycle Etiquette.

Rule 1: Provide a clear description.
When you offer an item on Freecycle, describe it as clearly and specifically as possible. Include a picture for any item that people might choose based partly on looks, or any item that's hard to describe clearly in writing. Also, provide as much detail you can in the item description, such as dimensions, color, material, and brand and model number. Providing all this information up front saves people the trouble of e-mailing you to ask for details—and it helps you by eliminating the risk for you that someone will request an item, show up, decide they don't like the looks of it, and back out.

Rule 2: Respond to messages.
If someone contacts you about a Freecycle post—either to request an item you've posted, or to offer something you've requested—you have an obligation to respond. Even if the item they're requesting is no longer available, simple courtesy demands that you tell them so.

Yet apparently, most Freecyclers don't bother to extend this common courtesy to others. Many times I've asked for an item and simply been left waiting for an answer, and it's incredibly annoying. I have no way of knowing whether I should be trying to plan my schedule around picking up the item or not. Whenever someone contacts me to ask for an item that I've already promised to someone else, I always reply to tell them so, and they usually respond with something along the lines of, "OK, thank you for letting me know." This shows that (1) they appreciate getting a reply, and (2) they're surprised to get it, because most people don't bother.

Rule 3: Express your intentions.
When you first contact someone about a Freecycle post, your message should state specifically what you want from them. If your message simply says, "Hi, is the bureau still available?" the other person has to e-mail you back to ask, "Yes, do you want it?" and then wait for your reply before you can start the process of making arrangements for a pickup. If you had simply said, "I am interested in the bureau, if it is still available," you could have started making arrangements right away.

Now, you might argue that this isn't really necessary, because obviously, anyone asking about the bureau must be interested in it. So in theory, you could simply respond to "Hi, is the bureau still available?" with "Yes, when would you like to pick it up?" But unfortunately, experience has taught me that this isn't a reasonable assumption. Often, my reply of "Yes, do you want it?" meets with no response—which suggests the answer is "No, not really." If I had instead replied with, "Yes, when would you like to pick it up?" I would have been left waiting for a reply that would never come, and being forced in the meantime to turn down other people who are requesting the same thing because I've already promised it to someone else.

In fact, it's better still if you go one step further and state in that first message not just that you are interested in the item, but when you would be able to pick it up: "I am interested in the bureau, if it is still available. I could pick it up Monday evening, if that's convenient." Including this information in your first message saves another round of back-and-forth messages. I have taken to putting in my posts, "If you are interested, please state in your first message when you can pick it up," in the hopes that this will save time—yet even then, most people ignore the request.

Rule 4: Be specific as to place and time.
This is kind of an extension of rule 3: when you offer to pick up an item, be as specific as possible about when you will be there. If you say, "I will come by some time on Saturday," or worse yet, "some time next weekend," then I have no idea when to expect you. If the item is too big for porch pickup, I'll be effectively held captive in my house all weekend waiting for you with no idea when you'll show up. If I'm leaving it out for porch pickup, this is less of a big deal, but it's still a minor inconvenience not to know how long the item will be out there.

By the same token, if you're the person offering the item, provide clear information about where your house is and what they must do to retrieve the item. I give not only my address, but a description of the house and a couple of landmarks they can use to help them find it. I also tell them if I want them to ring the bell or if I will leave the item out for porch pickup, and if it's the latter, exactly where the item will be: "I'll put it in a bag labeled 'Freecycle' and tie it to the railings of the side stoop." This may seem like overkill, but even with these detailed directions, some people still have trouble finding an item I've left out for them, and they either ring the bell or e-mail me later to say they came by and couldn't find it. But I can at least minimize the problem by being as specific as possible.

4. Honor your obligations.
If you have promised an item to someone, make sure that item is in the stated place at the stated time. If you said you would leave it out for porch pickup, make sure it's out there by the time the person is supposed to arrive; if they're coming to the door, then make sure you're home at the time they said they'd be there. And, obviously, if you have promised something to one person, don't give it to someone else instead just because they could come pick it up earlier. If you're not willing to wait until Tuesday, then don't promise the item to someone who can't come until Tuesday.

Likewise, if you have promised to pick something up at a given time, be there at that time. Don't assume that, just because the item is free, it doesn't really matter if you keep your promise. Even though there's no money at stake, you are still creating inconvenience for the person who posted it and has been forced to stay home waiting for you, or else gone to the trouble of hauling the item out to the porch only to see it sit there unclaimed.

Of course, emergencies do happen that can prevent you from showing up as scheduled. Your car breaks down; you have to stay home with a sick child; you're forced to work late. If something like this happens and you can't be there when you promised you would, SAY SO. It only takes a minute to send an e-mail to say you can't make it and attempt to reschedule. That way, the person can at least leave the house instead of sitting there waiting and wondering if you're ever going to show up. And if you can't arrange another suitable time for the pickup, they at least have a chance to withdraw their offer and give the item to someone else, instead of being stuck in limbo with an item they can't get rid of and can't give to anyone else because it's already promised to you.

5. Post a "taken" message.
After your item has been picked up, remember to go back to Freecycle and post a new message to say the item is now taken. Otherwise, it will still appear as an available item, and people will waste their time and yours asking you about it.


If everyone could just follow these five simple rules when using Freecycle, I think it would be a much more pleasant experience for everyone—givers and receivers alike. If you think there are any other important rules of Freecycle etiquette that I've left out, let me know in the comments.

The complicated truth about plastic bags

Early this year, our town passed an ordinance banning single-use plastic bags. The bags are being phased out in stages: In Phase 1, which started this May, stores will have to charge shoppers 10 cents for each plastic bag they use (though they have the option of providing recyclable paper bags at no charge). In Phase 2, starting in November, stores will no longer be allowed to provide single-use plastic bags at all, but they may continue to offer paper bags for 10 cents each. These rules apply only to the bags used at the register; plastic bags used for wrapping up meat, fish, produce, and baked goods are still allowed, as are the plastic bags your newspaper comes in and the one the dry cleaner sticks over your clothes.

If all this sounds excessively complicated, there's a reason for it. The town went to a lot of trouble when crafting the law to make sure it wouldn't end up doing more harm to the environment than good.

You see, it turns out that the whole issue of plastic bag use is a lot more complex than it looks. As I noted back in my last Thrift Week entry, most of the alternatives to plastic bags cause environmental problems that can be even worse. A single-use paper bag, according to a 2011 analysis by the UK EPA, has a life-cycle carbon footprint four times as big as a plastic bag's. In other words, you'd have to reuse a paper bag three times to make it as green as a plastic bag used just once. And that darling of environmentalists, the cotton tote bag, would have to be reused 131 times.

In a Danish study from 2018, which looked at factors other than climate change—water use, ozone depletion, toxicity, and so on—these alternatives fared even worse. Assuming that a plastic bag gets reused once as a trash can liner before it's finally discarded, the authors concluded that a paper bag would need to be reused 43 times to be equally green, and a bag made of conventionally grown cotton would need to be reused 7,100 times. And in case you're thinking organic cotton would do better, the Danish scientists found just the opposite; an organic cotton bag would need to be reused 20,000 times—I repeat, TWENTY THOUSAND TIMES—to be as green as the much-maligned LDPE plastic bag.

And plastic bag bans can have additional, unintended consequences as well. NPR's Planet Money did a story on this in April, based largely on the work of Rebecca Taylor, an economist at the University of Sydney in Australia. She did a study comparing towns in California that had plastic bag bans to similar towns that didn't, and she found that in the towns with bag bans, people were buying more than twice as many small plastic bags, because they no longer had plastic shopping bags to line their trash cans or pick up their dogs' poop. And since these commercially available bags are thicker than the ones used at the supermarket checkout, this undid about 30% of the reduction in plastic use caused by the ban.

So does that mean banning plastic bags is just a straight-up bad idea? Well, not necessarily. Although plastic bags are in fact less harmful to the environment as a whole than most other types, they can do a lot of concentrated harm within a city. When people don't dispose of them properly—and sometimes even when they do, because an empty bag can easily get blown right out of a trash can—they wash into waterways where they harm wildlife, or clog storm drains and cause flooding. And since the easiest way to reduce plastic bag litter is to reduce plastic bag use, a ban can make sense.

The trick, then is to design a ban in such a way that it reduces the use of plastic bags, but doesn't encourage the use of alternatives that are even worse. Our legislators in Highland Park were apparently aware of this, which is why they went to so much trouble to make sure our ban wouldn't simply replace plastic bags with paper ones. They also somewhat addressed the dog poop/trash can liner issue by continuing to allow plastic produce bags and newspaper bags. These bags are probably less likely to become litter than plastic shopping bags, because people usually don't unpack them until they get home, where they can throw them straight in the trash—or save them to reuse when walking the dog.

All this was in my mind when I read on Nextdoor Woodbridge, a bulletin-board group for my neighborhood, about a proposed plastic bag ban in East Brunswick. I immediately chimed in to talk about the importance of making sure the ban doesn't simply trade plastic bags for paper ones, and to point out that according to Taylor's research, charging a fee for single-use bags does just as good a job of reducing their use as banning them, with fewer negative side effects.

Unfortunately, this suggestion didn't go over very well. Most of the people who commented seemed to be approaching the issue from the knee-jerk "Plastic is bad!" perspective, and they didn't want to hear any excuses for anything short of an outright ban. One person wanted to know why Highland Park was "selling" the bags for 10 cents a pop instead of eliminating them entirely:

Why are they made available at all ? Why ?? If the real concern is cleaning up the environment !! ???? Doesn't make common sense to me .

Another argued that there was no good reason to use plastic bags for bin liners or dog poop:

There are dog poop pick up products that decompose in the land fills. If you can afford having a dog or cat you can afford to buy or repurpose something else for this job. How about using paper bags for your small, bedroom, bathroom, office small trash cans. Maybe also try to compost or compost more and use larger paper bags for kitchen garbage cans as well. So you have to rinse it out ever once in a while.

These comments were kind of discouraging to me, because they directly contradict the best available science on plastic and the environment. "If the real concern is cleaning up the environment," then it makes perfect "common sense" to care about what people are replacing their plastic bags with, and whether it's more destructive to the environment than plastic. And it definitely does not make sense to encourage people to buy paper bags, with their much larger ecological footprint, as a "green" alternative to plastic.

But it seems that once people have it in their heads that plastic is Public Enemy Number One, nothing you can say will convince them otherwise. They already know what they believe in, so don't confuse them with your facts. I've encountered this same problem on the Plastic Free July site, where they recommend reusable bags "made from natural fibres such as such ethically-produced cotton" (which are much more destructive to the environment than single-use plastic) as "a fantastic alternative to single-use plastic bags," and suggest replacing your plastic trash can liners with "a few sheets of newspaper" (which has a higher carbon footprint than plastic") or "certified compostable bin liner bags" (which won't actually turn into compost in a landfill, but will break down faster than plastic, thereby producing more planet-warming methane).

So I guess the real point of this post is simply a plea to all my fellow environmentalists: Let's try to use our heads, as well as our hearts. I know the video of the turtle with the straw up its nose is incredibly upsetting. It makes you want to do whatever you can to stop things like this from happening. And on the face of it, banning these single-use plastics seems like an easy fix. But if we really want to help the ocean and the creatures that live in it, we need to do more than just grasp at the obvious solution. We need to actually consider all the impacts of our choices—such as whether the carbon emissions caused by paper bag production are more harmful than a bunch of plastic bags sitting unchanged in a sanitary landfill. If we ignore inconvenient facts and just rush toward the option we've already decided on, we're no better than the folks who deny climate change exists because they don't want to have to give up their steak and their SUVs.

Plastic-Free-ish July 2019

Last year, as you may recall, I had a somewhat frustrating experience attempting to take the Plastic Free July challenge. Although I signed up for only the most basic form of the challenge—pledging to avoid plastic "takeaway items" (bags, bottles, cups, and straws)—I still wasn't 100 percent successful, and I felt guilty about every little scrap of plastic that found its way into our home, no matter how small or how difficult it would have been to avoid. I concluded that for most people, avoiding single-use plastics entirely simply isn't a practical goal. Instead, reducing plastic waste will require changes on a societal level, such as imposing fees for plastic bags in cities and towns, putting stricter requirements on manufacturers to make their packaging recyclable or otherwise sustainable, or improving methods of plastic recycling.

Well, since then, there have in fact been a couple of changes in society, at least in our area. On the plus side, our town has enacted a new plastic shopping bag ban, which means we don't have to be as vigilant as we used to about avoiding plastic bags when we shop. (Even though I always brought my own reusable bag, I wasn't always fast enough at getting my groceries into it before the clerks shoved them into a plastic bag I didn't want.) But on the minus side, our curbside recycling program no longer accepts plastics other than #1 and #2. This same change has been occurring pretty much all over the country, because China, which used to be the final destination for most of our plastic waste, has stopped accepting these plastics. So now, any plastic that does make its way into our house is less likely to get recycled.

So, although I didn't officially sign up for the challenge this year, I'm still planning to track my plastic use this July to see how much waste I produce. I'm keeping a day-by-day tally of all the single-use plastics that enter my home, and in each case, noting what alternative (if any) I could have chosen to avoid this plastic, and why I didn't. Here are my results for the first week of the month.

July 1
Went to Rite Aid to pick up a prescription. I did not get a plastic bag to carry it in, so that's good. On the downside, the medicine came in a #4 plastic bottle, which isn't even recyclable. Unfortunately, I had no alternative in this case; that's just the way the medicine is sold.

July 3
We made a shopping trip to Trader Joe's and picked up several items, some with plastic packaging and some without:

• A 19-ounce block of tofu. The #2 plastic container it came in was recyclable, but the peel-off plastic lid was not. However, there were no other brands there that came without plastic packaging. If we had put off our purchase until our next trip to the Whole Earth Center, we could have picked up a block of tofu from the bulk bin, but we'd still have needed a plastic bag to carry it in (and anyway, we wanted the tofu for this weekend).
• A bag of chocolate chips. We could have bought these from the bulk bins at Whole Earth and carried them home in a reusable container, but only for a ludicrous price (something like $12 a pound).
• Two cartons of almond milk. These cartons are made mostly of cardboard, but they're lined with a thin layer of plastic and also have a plastic spout and cap, so they're not recyclable. One of the most frustrating things for me about switching to almond milk for the sake of its lower carbon footprint is that it has considerably increased the amount of waste our household produces, since milk comes in recyclable plastic jugs and almond milk does not. In theory, I could make my own, which would greatly cut down the amount of plastic waste involved (though not eliminate it completely, since the almonds themselves also come in a plastic bag). But the big problem with that is that homemade almond milk, made without thickeners, requires far more almonds than the commercial stuff. This makes it both much more expensive and much more destructive to the environment—which kind of defeats the purpose of buying almond milk in the first place.
• Five nectarines. We could have bought a whole dozen nectarines for $6, but them came in a cardboard crate with a plastic top and plastic liner. So, for the sake of avoiding that waste, we bought the nectarines from the bulk bin instead for 69 cents each—over 50 percent more per nectarine.
• One free sample of vanilla ice cream with blueberry pie and fresh raspberries. It came in a little cardboard cup, but the store had also provided a small plastic spoon (which I couldn't decline, since it was already in the cup). However, I did not throw this spoon away, but instead tucked it into my purse to use any time I encounter another free sample that doesn't come with its own spoon. So technically, it's not waste.

July 4
We went to the Folk Project's annual Fourth of July picnic, deliberately taking along our own plates, cups, and utensils so we wouldn't need to take any disposable ones. As it turns out, this didn't prevent any plastic waste, since the Folk Project was using paper plates and cups anyway (which may have been counterproductive, since the evidence suggests that single-use cups made from much-maligned Styrofoam have a lower carbon footprint than paper ones). Ironically, though, we still ended up going home with garbage, since the park where the picnic was held has a "carry-in, carry-out policy" that you must take all your own waste home with you. Since we never fill up our big trash bin anyway, we volunteered to carry home one of the Folk Project's trash bags for disposal.

July 5
With Brian off from work for the holiday weekend, we made a trip together to the farmers' market. Due to a minor oversight, we were unable to bring our reusable mesh produce bags, because we'd left them in the trunk of our car when we dropped it off at the shop that morning. But that was no problem, since we had some reused plastic bags to take along instead. In fact, our waste production on this trip was actually negative, because we took the opportunity to return a cardboard egg carton to the farmer we'd bought it from for reuse. We also dropped off some plastic bags for recycling in the bin at the Stop & Shop and some other items in the Terracycle bin at the Reformed Church.

To round out our sustainable outing, we visited the Dunkin Donuts and successfully ordered a sugar-laden beverage in my reusable travel cup, with a reused straw from our sizable collection at home. We even picked up some litter off the street during our walk—not actually eliminating any plastic waste, but at least helping to keep it out of the oceans.

July 6
While preparing a pot of chili for dinner, Brian realized we were out of onions, so we ran out to the Stop&Shop for one. We got this out of the bulk bin, so it didn't come with any packaging—but while we were there, we spotted some pasta on sale and decided to grab a pound. It was in a cardboard box, but it had a small plastic window in the front, so that added one tiny piece to our non-recyclable plastic load. (We could have avoided this waste by buying pasta from the bulk bins at the Whole Earth Center instead, but it would cost more than three times as much that way. If we cared that much about the Plastic Free July challenge, it would have been much cheaper to put off buying pasta at all until July was over.)


My preliminary results from this one week of waste-tracking show that we're producing more waste in total this year than we were last year, mainly because of the switch from plastic milk jugs to almond milk cartons. True, a smaller volume of that waste is plastic, but a larger volume of it is non-recyclable, so it's not really an improvement. However, I would still say that we're not using a lot of single-use plastic, certainly not a lot compared to most Americans. There's a little bit of room for improvement, but I would say not so much as to be worth the trade-offs.