Thoughts on Grocery Shopping

A couple of years before COVID-19, I started using Fred Meyer grocery pickup. So, instead of wandering the aisles with or without (often) a shopping list for grocery shopping, I could sit down with my selected recipe and select just the items I needed to prepare that recipe and not be distracted by the specials at the end of the aisles. The grocery pickup service cost $5 at the time, but I loved the time savings and additional savings of avoiding impulse buys.

Four years later, I’m still using grocery pickup for my grocery shopping method. I still love it. With my commitment to cooking more in my retirement and trying to ramp that up here at the beginning of 2024, I went a little crazy and planned three meals, made a shopping list, and ordered the groceries for three meals twice. However, I had not built up my cooking muscle habit yet, so twice in January, I had to dump at least some of the groceries I bought into the bin because I did not follow up and cook the recipes I planned.

Throwing away food makes me so angry with myself, but the anger is not enough to get me over my disinterest in cooking and into the kitchen so the food doesn’t go to waste. Food waste is such an important issue. The stereotypical “starving children in ….” is not practical or helpful for me. Instead, I think about the money going out the door with the purchased and unused food, the added volume in my trash pickup, and the cleanup. Ugh. Here’s an interesting piece on food waste in Oregon just to illustrate how awful the problem is: Oregon Food Waste

I have been giving this some thought, and for the near future, I’m only going to shop for groceries for a single recipe at a time. If I meet my current goal of cooking twice weekly, I will make two trips to pick up groceries. Also, using more gasoline but less wasted food is the right direction. That is the W I am looking for at this stage.