No bad questions: Can Canadians have plastic-free produce and eat it too?

See full article at GenerateCanada.ca

For me, it’s the cucumbers. The long, sweet, seedless ones. It’s the guilt I feel, unpeeling them from their plastic sheath, tossing it in the garbage.  That guilt re-doubled when, inevitably, a few days later, I’m mopping up the decomposed end—the last forgotten quarter of cuke— from the veggie crisper.  

Like so many of us, I want to do better. I definitely want to throw away less plastic, and I urgently want to waste less food.  What I’ve only just started to realize, however, is that these two goals have, not exactly an inverse relationship, but a complicated one. 

If I have learned anything from my time at Generate Canada, it’s that making progress on wicked challenges like plastic waste and food waste requires a patient and thoughtful reckoning with the complex systems that produce them.  One way to light up the messy threads of any problem is to try to solve it.  So this story starts with a set of hotly debated proposed regulations to reduce plastic waste from the produce we buy.  

Spoiler alert:  the happy ending here isn’t about how to design a perfect plastic waste policy (if such a thing is even possible).  Rather, it’s about what happens when we start to grapple, clear-eyed, with our imperfect systems and the imperfect choices they serve us. Namely, the opportunity for true innovation.