My husband does our weekly food shopping every Sunday. I use an iPhone app to put the list together for what we need for breakfast and lunch. He takes that list and adds the items he wants to make for dinners during the week. When he comes home, I put the groceries away and clean out any rotten leftovers from the previous week. Since the pandemic, I’m doing a lot more washing of produce, but it all works.
Until today. My husband came home from the grocery store with our purchases. Now several weeks ago, this grocery store announced that it was OK to bring your reusable bags into the store and that they were no longer going to provide plastic and paper bags. If you didn’t bring your own bags, they would charge you for paper bags. Now, I am totally onboard with getting rid of single-use plastic bags in stores, but there is a pandemic going on right now, people! Maybe letting folks bring their own bags into a store is not the best thing for the store employees. I mean, you don’t know where those bags have been, right?
And this grocery store thought of that — when my husband got home with the groceries, in our OWN reusable bags, the store employees had stuffed a paper flyer in EACH of our bags. The flyer listed the proper proceedure for washing your reusuable bags, which we purchased at this grocery store. There was a whole diagram and list of instructions by type of bag. If you’re curious, we’re using the “woven or nonwoven polypropylene bags” which must be “machine-wash on gentle cycle with soap and cold water or hand-wash with soap and water, line dry”.
Now I am all for washing things. People have been so freaked out during this pandemic about washing their hands that you can’t find a bottle of hand soap in Target, which makes me think — were these same folks not washing their hands before?? Did they not use hand soap?? Is that why Target can’t keep in on the shelves??
And I will admit — I have had some of these woven reusable bags for multiple years and have never washed them. Yes, I said that, but I’ve never had anything spill in them and I alsways shake them out in the sink after emptying the bags every week. There might be a stray red onion skin, but that’s really all you will find in my reusable shopping bags.
Maybe I am being naive, maybe I should have been washing them all along. But I am certainly not hand washing reusable grocery bags! How would I even do that?? In my kitchen sink? In the bathtub??
I was so annoyed that the grocery store gave me an additional chore to do on an already chore-filled Sunday, that I tossed our four reusable bags into the washing machine. I selectd the “delicate” cycle and I hung them to air dry on my drying rack where I typically hang my bras and work dresses. And I was annoyed — annoyed that I needed to do this task, maybe annoyed that I hadn’t thought of this before today. But definitely annoyed that I had to wash the bags today. And don’t tell on me, but I already decided that I am not doing it next Sunday.
Notes from a Self Quarantine 