On to a more sustainable future....

This is my first post and I'm not quite sure where to even begin. My family is starting a new journey. We have been vegetarians going on two years now and have been fairly good about eating organic. We have four kids in our house and they are also vegetarians. We have two dogs that I think will soon be going "veggie" too.

This year, however, we've decided that we'd like to take on the challenge of giving up the grocery store. Now, when I say grocery store I mean any large grocery chain. There is a small local organic privately owned store, Kristiana's, that we will use to buy some of our bulk goods and meat substitutes. It has been years since we've shopped at mega stores like Warped-mart, but we want to attempt to give up large grocery stores too.

Our goal is to live a sustainable lifestyle that does no more harm than absolutely necessary and we feel like this is where we can begin. We want to reduce the waste (i.e. packaging) that we accumulate. By shopping in bulk and at the farmer's market we will be reducing our post consumer waste significantly. In the Spring we will also be planting a garden in order to grow much of our own produce.

I am not nieve to the fact that this is going to really be a challenge. I keep thinking of things that I buy at the grocery store without ever giving it any thought. Now, I am having to contemplate what I am going to replace it with or how I can buy it fresh locally.

We've already started this week by a trip to the farmer's market on Saturday (we have some great farmers markets around here), a phone call to the locally owned pet store about buying large bags of vegetarian dog food, making an appointment to have a solar panel evaluation done on our house, and convincing the kids that they can live on mom's homemade granola instead of store bought cereal. We're off to a good start....