Wasteful and pointless food packaging

I am officially moved in and chipping away at the days until winter break. With six girls living in our relatively small (for so many of us) condo, I have been shocked by the overflowing trash every morning. It is surprising that we fill a large trashcan so often. I decided to start digging through it and seeing if people were throwing away recyclables (which is a problem we have been having). Unfortunately for the most part everything in our trashcan was in fact non-recyclable. The majority of our massive mound of trash was food packaging.

With so many of us eating together many people had bought food from big box stores that seem to believe that we want all of our food hermetically sealed and wrapped in plastic. We have a dozen apples sealed in a massive plastic coffin, coffee creamer that is individually packaged in tiny plastic cups, dried fruit and nuts in plastic bags, and countless other plastic enclosed food items.

To avoid all of the packaging and still be able to get such large quantities relatively cheap food it looks like we will need to go to the farmers market for our produce and see what we can buy in smaller quantities without wasting money.