Liz Brown Morgan is a wilderness guide, turned environmentalist, turned water lawyer, turned tax lawyer turned Agrarian Revolutionary. Liz is the founder of Backyard Agrarian through which she writes about the requisite Agrarian Revolution and the Landscape Imperative needed to save ourselves – from ourselves. Liz is a yogi, a wild gardener, a telemark skier, a rafter, an eco-entrepreneur and a community activist. She lives in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains just outside of Boulder, Colorado.

On the cusp of spring, here in the high mountains of Colorado, I found myself embroiled in the weekly battle that my husband typically oversees: Recycling. I was appalled. We are environmentalists. We eat organic food. We buy local. We do, what we thought, was our best to eat and live responsibly given the constraints of the culture that we live in. But here I was, up against that unspoken behemoth of wastefulness: food packaging.

I decided then and there to embark on a 30-day adventure without packaged food. I convinced my husband to join me, cleaned out the cupboards, grabbed some tote bags and Tupperware, and headed to the farmers markets, the grocery stores and whatever farm stands I could find.