Written by Amy Newsome for Community News, April 2021
Sometimes ingenuity strikes when you’re doing the most repetitive and mundane task. Kat Nouri was packing her kids’ millionth school lunch and it just struck her one day how much plastic waste they were generating with each meal. As a silicone textile developer, she immediately wondered if silicone could be used to create an alternative to plastic food bags.
In addition to replacing plastic bags in lunch boxes, Stasher bags can safely go from the freezer to the microwave, oven, or boiling water; and then into the dishwasher! To avoid those mystery bags in your freezer, you can label your bags with a dry erase marker. The bags can be exposed to 400° Fahrenheit safely.
And if you’re super fancy you can use the bags for sous vide cooking, which is a technique in which your food and seasonings are sealed in a bag and cooked in hot water. This approach keeps all the food’s flavor, nutrition and moisture intact. Made of pure platinum silicone (the highest grade of silicone), Stasher bags are completely free of BPA, BPS, lead, latex, and phthalates so they meet all U.S., Canadian and even the most restrictive, European Union, food safety standards. One Stasher can be used over a thousand times. And if the bag eventually loses its ability to seal, you can send it back to Stasher Bags and they have them ground down to be made into playground pebble surface material!
Last September, Kat published a book called Let’s Fix Lunch: Enjoy Delicious, Planet-Friendly Meals at Work, School, or On the Go. The book includes 30 recipes for salads, soups, sandwiches, pastas and snacks as well as tips for using more sustainable ingredients. For every copy sold, Stasher will donate to No Kid Hungry, a terrific organization that works to feed hungry kids.
The Moscow Food Co-Op carries Stasher’s snack, sandwich and half gallon sized bags in lots of fun colors.
Stasher Bags’ mission is to “provide beautifully designed, hyper-functional alternatives to plastic that are better for people and the planet."
This information and more can be found at https://www.stasherbag.com/.