Zero Waste Pizza: Not Gonna Happen

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I’ve got an awesome matrix I came up with to take the guess work out of meal planning. Each week I have seven dinners that must fall into these catagories:

Paleo dinner x 2 • Veggie x 2 • Kid-friendly x 1 • Dine out x 1 • Pizza x 1

The problem is, I’m only ever able to commit to the last three. Especially pizza night.

And pizza is one of those things we as a family decided that like waste water treatment and politics, pizza is something best left to the pros. So for the purposes of Zero Waste, I know making homemade pizza is the best, but we don’t do it at our house.

So that leaves us with two options. Delivery and the freezer aisle.

Delivery is easy to assess. It’s on the “Trash” side of my Recycle or Not page because, well, it’s trash.

That grease spot under the $5 deliciousness makes it ineligible for the recycle bin.

So that leaves us among the Whole Foods dinner-time rush, pushing a cart with two tired and hungry kids and trying not to make eye contact with the fabulous and single twenty-somethings (don’t worry, they won’t make eye contact with you) who have the rest of the night to make a vichyssoise they’ll pair with a sauv blanc and follow up with fireplace canoodling to Diane Krall.

Wait – that’s what I’d do if I had the time.

I don’t know what an actual twenty-something would do.

Whole Foods take-out and Big Bang Theory?

Anyway – frozen pizza. It’s easy and not as bad for you as take out. So I tell myself.

But look what comes with every frozen pizza in the freezer:

Plastic.

Yah, I know. You don’t want your $8 chevre and tomato bits tumbling all over the box during transport.

But here’s my problem. $5 pizza exists. It LITERALLY takes me less time to get the kids in the car, drive to $5 pizza place, get kids out of the car (only because I don’t want to be arrested), buy $5 pizza, and get home with a ready and sliced pizza than it takes to preheat, heat, cool and cut a more expensive pizza that comes with plastic instead of contaminated cardboard waste.