Minor plagiarism warning: I’m about to describe how my mom buys groceries and pretend that I reasoned it out from first principles to make myself feel better about shopping inefficiently for a while.

I am horrible at grocery shopping. I know how to maneuver a cart and use self-checkout usually, but every week, without fail, I walk down to the expensive grocery store down the street, and buy as much as I can carry for the walk home. I would like to learn to cook different foods, but I always put off finding new recipes until I’m subsisting on plain rice, raw tortillas, and eggs. Then when I finally make it to the store, and load up on milk, bread, and fruit, I hardly have enough room to carry half the ingredients I wanted. Then the recipe doesn’t turn out well or I give up cooking it at all or some of the ingredients go bad before I can get others. And the cycle repeats.

Maybe everyone else has thought about this and I’m the only one who feels lost in a grocery store. It doesn’t seem like it should be possible to be bad at grocery shopping. On the surface, there’s not much skill or strategy required. Some people make a list, but that’s about the extent of outward planning I’ve seen.

This is my attempt to formalize a better shopping strategy for myself. It should go without saying that this is based on my own specific goals. If you prefer to order takeout every night or are content with the recipes you know, then this probably won’t apply to you. I’ve tried to enumerate all my goals below.

Goals

• Maximize health
  • Obviously, I try not to starve. Beyond that, I remember that I’m the one who has to live in my body for however long. If a particular food makes me sick immediately, I wouldn’t eat it very often. If it made me sick in a few years, I also try not to.
• Maximize taste
  • Speaks for itself. No one wants to eat bad food. Minimize cost
• Minimize cost
  • Of course everyone is constrained by their own budget, but no one should overpay for an item when they can get an equivalent item for less.
• Minimize food waste
  • I view this through a cost lens as well. Any food that I throw away is money that I didn’t need to spend.
• Maximize openness to new experiences
  • I want to try new foods and recipes. You know when you’re on a long car ride with someone and you only start having a good conversation in the last ten minutes? What a pity it would be to discover a great dish on your deathbed.
• Minimize effort
  • This means both that I want to minimize the number of shopping trips, and that I want to purchase foods I have the energy to prepare. It also means I want to minimize the stress of planning recipes and grocery trips.

Types of Groceries

Not all groceries are created. Some are more perishable, more likely to be used in recipes, heavier, more common, or more expensive. Since it’s hard to imagine higher dimensional spaces, I’ll just list the to three axes.

• Perishability
  • Perishability ranges from things like spices, dried pastas, rices, and canned foods on one end, through long-lasting onions and potatoes to week-long foods like bread and milk to the extremely persnickety herbs and fresh breads. Some foods can also be frozen without consequences.
• Recipe Use
  • This may be closer to a binary, but it ranges from foods that are ready-to-eat like chips or ice cream to foods that are exclusively used in recipes like spices, onions, or garlic. Some foods may have complements like milk and cereal or cream cheese and bagels. Others, like bananas live in both camps.
• Staple
  • This axis ranges from specialty foods that you only get on occasion (like fresh herbs or a treat-yourself cheese) to “staple” foods that you always have on hand like onions, bread, milk, eggs, or rice.

How to Shop

With my goals established, this is the way I’ve decided to shop. (Between the first draft and revision of this post, I’ve already done this a few times, and it seems to be working well.) The key is to shop as infrequently as possible for nonperishables and staples. I am going to arbitrarily choose twice a month as the frequency. Buy enough of these items for the coming two weeks. Since I’ll be getting a lot of things on these trips (at least by weight, it makes sense to drive somewhere cheaper like ALDI.)

For me, there are enough “weekly perishable” staples like milk and eggs that weekly grocery runs still make sense. Typically, I envision these also being times when I pick up recipe-specific, perishable items. Without having to worry about staples, I can focus more on getting everything I need for weekly recipes.

Although I probably won’t want to do more than one grocery run per month, as long as I’m diligent about staying stocked up, it should be less of a burden to run to the store for one or two items if I’m craving them or need them for a recipes. This will be much less stressful when I don’t have to worry about everything that I’m short on.