Two summers ago I counted the bin bags. One ordinary fortnight cruising the Atlantic coast, two adults and two teenagers, and we generated an embarrassing tower of plastic at the recycling point in Les Sables d'Olonne. Most of it was packaging we never needed. We had provisioned the lazy way, a supermarket trolley filled with shrink-wrapped everything, because that is what you do at home. France, it turns out, makes it surprisingly easy to do better, and the food is nicer for it.
France has already done half the work
You arrive into a country that has been chipping away at single-use plastic for years, which changes what is even available to you. Plastic checkout bags thinner than 50 microns have been banned in French shops since 1 January 2017, both at the till and in the loose-produce aisle, so you will not be handed a flimsy bag for your tomatoes the way you might be elsewhere. The wider anti-waste law keeps tightening: from 1 January 2025 magazines can no longer be sold shrink-wrapped in plastic, and takeaway caterers must offer reusable or recyclable containers.
The headline ambition is a phase-out of all single-use plastic packaging by 2040, with a 100 percent plastic recycling target set for 2025. You do not need to memorise the legislation. The point is that the grain of the country runs in your favour, so provisioning with less plastic is going with the current, not against it.
The market is the answer to most of it
The single biggest change we made was simple: buy fresh food at the market, not the supermarket. Almost every French town of any size has a marche, often two or three mornings a week, and the produce arrives loose. You bring your own bags and the plastic problem largely evaporates.
A market run looks like this. Cloth bags for vegetables, paper from the stallholder for cheese, your own container held out at the fish stall, a string bag for bread from the boulangerie. The vendors are used to it now, and a cruiser turning up with their own tubs gets approving nods rather than confusion. For the wider joy and rhythm of shopping this way, the practicalities of provisioning a boat in France from markets are worth a read, because eating with the market also means eating seasonally and cheaply.
The kit that actually earns its locker space
You do not need much, but the right gear makes plastic-free provisioning effortless rather than worthy:
- A folding shopping trolley or a couple of sturdy canvas bags. The marina-to-market walk can be a kilometre with a full load.
- A nest of lidded containers in graduating sizes for meat, fish, and cheese straight from the counter.
- Beeswax wraps and a few glass jars, which double as storage and stop half-used food rotting in clingfilm.
- A proper water setup so you are not buying cases of plastic bottles. French tap water on the coast is almost universally safe to drink, the marina tap fills your tanks, and a decent filter handles any that tastes of chlorine.
That last one matters more than people expect. Cases of bottled water are heavy, bulky, and a sin of single-use plastic. Filling your tanks and carrying a couple of refillable bottles kills the problem outright.
Storing it once it is aboard
Buying loose creates one genuine challenge: unpackaged food needs managing. Without shrink wrap and best-before dates, you become the quality control. This forces good habits. You shop little and often, which suits a boat that visits a port most days anyway, and you eat the perishable things first.
Keeping food fresh without relying on packaging is its own small craft, and the tricks in keeping food fresh without a fridge apply doubly when you have stripped away the plastic that supermarkets use to extend shelf life. Hard cheeses in a wrap, eggs unwashed and unrefrigerated, root vegetables in a ventilated net, bread eaten the day you buy it. None of it is hard once it becomes routine.
The supermarket still has its place
I am not going to pretend we boycott the supermarket. For tinned tomatoes, pasta, oil, coffee, and the bulk dry stores that get you through a passage, the big shop on the edge of town is unavoidable and sensible. The trick is to buy the long-life staples there in the least-packaged form, then top up the fresh stuff at the market.
French supermarkets increasingly have bulk-buy bins, the vrac section, where you fill your own container with rice, lentils, nuts, and dried fruit. It is patchy by store but growing fast, and on a boat where dry stores last all season it is a genuine plastic saver. When you do generate packaging, getting it sorted and off the boat responsibly is its own task, and the guidance on recycling and waste ashore in French ports covers how the French bin system expects you to separate it.
The drinks problem nobody admits to
Provisioning advice always tidies away the awkward truth that a cruising crew drinks, and the drinks locker is a plastic minefield if you let it be. Cases of bottled water are the obvious sin, solved by filling your tanks. But fizzy drinks in plastic bottles, beer in plastic-wrapped multipacks, and cheap wine in plastic-lined boxes all sneak aboard.
France makes the good choice easy here too. Wine is the obvious one. Buy it in glass at the market or a local cave, ideally direct from a producer near wherever you are cruising, and you get better wine, less plastic, and a far nicer story than a supermarket box. Glass bottles also stow beautifully in the bilge, low down where the weight belongs. Beer in cans recycles cleanly and chills fast in a bucket of seawater. The plastic that does not come aboard never has to be wrestled to a distant recycling point in 30-degree heat, which is its own quiet reward.
Why this matters more on a boat than ashore
At home, plastic packaging is a vague background guilt. On a boat it is a physical, immediate problem, and that is precisely why cruising is a good place to break the habit. Every piece of packaging you bring aboard has to be stored, because there are no bins at anchor, and then carried ashore and sorted. Loose food from a market generates a fraction of that volume, so you are not just being virtuous, you are buying yourself a tidier, less smelly boat and fewer trips lugging bin bags up a pontoon.
There is a safety angle too that gets forgotten. Loose plastic on deck blows overboard, and a plastic bag in the water is a wrap-around-the-propeller hazard as well as an environmental one. The less plastic aboard, the less there is to escape into the sea you are sailing through. It all points the same way: take less aboard in the first place.
Why this is more than virtue signalling
It would be easy to file plastic-free provisioning under smug lifestyle choice. On a boat it is more practical than that. Less packaging means less rubbish to store on a vessel with no bins, fewer trips lugging bags to a distant recycling point, and food that tastes of the place you are actually cruising rather than of a factory. The plastic that does not come aboard is plastic that cannot blow off the deck into the sea, which on a windy passage is a real risk and an ugly one.
It also sits naturally alongside the rest of a low-impact cruise. The same instinct that has you reaching for biodegradable washing-up liquid and reading about grey water and biodegradable products is the instinct that has you carrying your own bags to the marche. It is all one habit: take less, waste less, leave the water and the quay as you found them.
The honest result
Last summer we counted the bin bags again. Same coast, same crew, same fortnight, and the recycling pile was a fraction of the size. We ate better, spent about the same, and spent more time wandering markets in towns we would otherwise have driven past on the way to a car park supermarket. Provisioning plastic-free in France is not a sacrifice. It is just the better way to feed a boat in a country that is already most of the way there.
