Clean 18 : Well Done Iceland, Ready Meals In Paper Packaging!

Those of you who follow us on Instagram will have seen me banging on about my most recent food obsession – Iceland’s frozen seafood sauces. Damn, they are good. I mean, really good, but despite being prawn and clam packed bundles of deliciousness for the ridiculously low price of £3.50, they still have the plastic guilt. It’s relatively thin, the packaging, but it’s still plastic.

As a grafting lady builder who deals with chronic pain, I love love love to cook but sometimes just don’t have the energy at the end of the day to stand vertical and prep fresh food, as much as I’d want to. During our renovation years here, we’ve had months with no cooking facilities at all and in the depths of winter (I know, hard to imagine now the temperatures have climbed again), it was hard going. We occasionally rely on ready meals and I hate throwing the plastic trays away. It’s one of the reasons we rarely buy takeaways meals which here in the UK, unlike those Chinese legal eagle takeouts on US telly, are hardly ever in paper tubs. Ready meals = too much waste and also, often, not enough flavour.

So, I was literally jumping for joy when I spotted these the other day. Meet my new curry buddies, in yep you guessed it, Iceland. Paper carton ready meals. I’ll say it again louder for you. PAPER CARTON READY MEALS!!!Picking it up ’cause I liked the cute packaging and at £1.50 per meal and £4 for 5, the price was fairly spectacular too. Turning it over, I fully expected to see a plastic underbelly which I’d have had to ruefully put back in the freezer. Honestly, I nearly fell over when I saw the cardboard. Maybe I even squealed, and people don’t often squeal in Iceland. From the cold maybe, if wearing a thin tee shirt. But squeals are uncommon I’d say.They are good, I mean properly good, both in taste and value. We bought ten of ’em, a mixed bag. Ok, maybe there’s not enough meat in just one of them for a super filling meal, but for a speedy lunch, or for five or six of them between two as a buffet tea – amazing! And most importantly, very very little plastic guilt.I chatted with the manager at the store about the packaging. He seemed genuinely delighted by the direction Iceland is taking, and the stance against excess plastic which his employers are making. Plus, he said that the cardboard actually gets damaged far less than brittle plastic trays which often crack or break on the corners. Bonus!

This is the company’s stance, if you want to read more.

Why aren’t ALL supermarkets doing this? Why can’t ALL ready meals be in cardboard trays and not plastic? C’mon Sainsburys, never mind individually wrapping chicken fillets in plastic pouches in case Millennials are squeamish – sort it out. C’mon M&S, you already try a little bit with some of your breaded chicken range, why not ditch the plastic on other ranges too? C’mon Waitrose, get some of that posh food of yours wrapped in paper!

In case you’re wondering, they taste pretty good too. This was lunch in the sunshine today on the Moregeous sunshine baked terrace.I’ve gotta be honest. I didn’t think much of this store in the past. It was a bit, well, crap. Kerry Katona. Enough said. But now it isn’t. It’s both affordable and quite a lot of the food there is pretty good. Some is, dare I say, quite exciting, as frozen food goes. And they have a pretty awesome policy on plastic.