Plastic-free eating

I have been passively frustrated for a long time, too long, about the amount of plastic packaging around the food I buy.  Turning that frustration into action has proved elusive until now, but this year, for the first time, I've managed to grow some vegetables and fruit in our quarter-or-so of an acre, and substitute at least some of the packaged, unblemished specimens with my own: less than perfect in looks, but far superior in taste and texture.
Even so, with a family of four to feed, I am still heavily dependent on other producers for the weekly shopping, including meat for two of the family.  (I am vegetarian, and Sam, who is nine, decided this summer also that he didn't want to eat 'dead stuff' anymore.)  We assiduously recycle and compost whatever we can, but the amount of non-recyclable plastic waste in my bin, mainly from shopping at Tesco's and the Coop, has been bothering me.  I can't keep the thought out of my mind that these containers, in contrast to the brevity of their usefulness, will take several hundred years of lying in a landfill site to decompose - and then only to plastic dust.
The other thing that recently got me thinking more seriously about plastic was a BBC programme called 'A Farm for the Future', which focussed on the issue of 'peak oil'.  What do plastics, paints, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers and electronic components have in common? The answer appears to be 'oil'.  When the oil reserves run out - what then?  The problems will actually start long before all the oil is used up, as the reserves become increasingly difficult and more costly to extract.  The turning point, or peak, at which extraction starts to become more difficult and the oil more scarce, is, by many estimates, already upon us.  The time has come for a radical re-think of how we produce our food, and, according to the programme, permaculture is the logical way forward.
Having become aware that plastic is a product of petroleum, my antipathy towards it has been further fuelled , and so, after this lengthy introduction, I have reached the main reason for my blog: a challenge to myself to feed the family for a week without using anything packaged in plastic.  A week is nothing, but if I can do it for a week, then why not for the rest of my life?  And then I can look at other lifestyle changes, bit by bit.  Change is built on small steps. 
I won't be starting my week immediately.  There are a few questions I need to sort out in my mind first, about how to achieve this.  Milk is a problem.  Orkney milk is only available in plastic bottles or paperboard cartons, but the paperboard is, of course, coated in plastic.  And there's cheese; cereals, pulses, meat.  What did we do before plastic was invented?  I do remember my mother buying cream cheese wrapped in paper from the deli counter at the local Spar.  I also remember running down to the ice-cream van at the end of our close, ceramic bowl in hand, to ask the man to fill it up with ice-cream.
I will have to research the alternatives ... so I'll be back soon, hopefully with some solutions.