Plastic Containers vs. Glass Containers

Am I the only one who likes peeking into other bloggers’ kitchen cupboards?  It’s like an up close and personal look at how you do food.  I also like seeing your house in an organized (or real life) state.  Really I just sound creepy now, but hopefully I’m not the only one who does this!

I’ve slowly been switching my food storage over from plastic to glass.  There are many posts about why plastic is bad and glass is good from a food safety perspective.  Glass also has other benefits too.

So the picture at the top of this post is where I am today.  I have a lot of glass jars and pyrex containers, but I also still have a fair amount of plastic containers.  The problem for me is that the size of container I use most is the individual portion square type, and most of those are plastic.  See that one with the green lid?  That’s my only glass rectangle for leftovers.  Otherwise it’s tiny bowls or big bowls.

So over the past week, I challenged myself to only use glass for food storage.  What that meant is that sometimes I had a small portion of leftovers in a large bowl.  It’s not the most efficient use of space, but it did help me to see what I need more of.  I also realized that some of my baby glass bowls are currently hijacked in the freezer with chopped jalapenos, and it might be better to dump those all in one jar and use the bowls for other things.

I’ve already been doing a good job of saving things like homemade broth in jars, and I have a stash of baby food jars that I use when I make my own (although we’re almost out of that stage already!).

If something is going to get reheated, that gets first dibs on a glass container.  If it’s a bread product, or something that’s going to be dumped out into another dish, it’s not as big of a deal right now.  For now, for the transition, this works, at least when I’m intentional about it.

My big dilemma is freezer ziplocs.  And I don’t know if that’s an easy thing I’m willing to give up right now, because I use them a lot.  I use them for my freezer meals, for applesauce, for chopped veggies.  Basically for whatever I want to freeze that I don’t have a container for.  And I don’t know a good way to do my freezer meals not in a bag.  If anyone has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

What about you?  Do you use plastic, glass, or a mixture of both like me?