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A strange thing has been happening lately when I’ve gotten fast food: I’ve started really paying attention to what they give me. Now my fast food is mostly limited to a chicken sandwich at Chick-Fil-A, so I’ll pick on them for a moment.

When I get it to go, they give me a small paper bag. Inside that small bag is my sandwich (wrapped in a second foil-and-paper bag), a couple of napkins, and a plastic-wrapped mint. If I get a cup of water or lemonade too (which I usually do) then there’s the styrofoam cup plus a plastic lid and an individually-wrapped straw.

So this single sandwich and drink that might take me at most 10 minutes to eat generates 8-9 pieces of trash, some of which is not very biodegradable at all. It costs me just over $4, but what did it really cost in fuel, time, energy, & natural resources? How did the chicken, lemonade & associated packaging get there? Where did they come from? And where does it go when I toss out the parts that aren’t recyclable? What resources are used throughout the entire process so that I could have a $4 meal?

Questions like that keep popping into my head, so I’ve been feeling kind of blah when I’ve gotten food like that lately. Not bad enough, yet, to stop doing that entirely, but I am at least thinking about how to reduce the waste. Thinking is the first step, right?

Fast food would be an easy area to reduce consumption in. Obviously eating less fast food (or none at all) would go a long way toward reducing consumption and waste, but there are less dramatic steps that could add up quickly if enough people did them. What if people started bringing their own cups, and refusing to accept the outer bags and the piles of napkins and condiments? For larger orders, maybe bringing your own bag could catch on in the fast food industry as well, the way it’s (slowly!) starting to catch on in grocery stores. It’s like we’re an individually wrapped world, and we don’t need to be.

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