What are Grocery Lists For?

Earlier this year, I reviewed Living the Savvy Life from a green perspective (Does Savvy = Green?).  To the extent that being savvy means investing your time, energy and money on what matters to you, rather than just accumulating stuff, I found a close correlation of underlying values. And where food is concerned, the concept of keeping the kitchen a well-organized, clean, and joyful place to spend quality time making what you enjoy eating would resonate with most foodies, including the slow food-ists and locavores.

When I started to work through implementing the good advice from Chapter 10: Food, however, I hit a stumbling block right away. As I detailed in Kitchen Inventory Confessions, getting a handle on what's in my cupboards, fridge and freezer was both daunting and humbling. Loving food as I do, I'm prone to fall into the more-is-better trap here. While doing the inventory exercise helped me pare down a bit, it's got to become an ongoing task.

Hopefully the next step, creating a master shopping list, will help with that maintenance.  It should at a minimum keep me from ever winding up again with two open jars of peanut butter in the fridge, and one waiting in the cupboard. If I can find a really good smart phone app to move the items onto, that will really tip the scales in the battle against overstocking.

To simply the process, I skipped the recommended step of dividing staples by the best stores to acquire them from, meant to help reduce running-around time and increase trip consolidation (green points for driving less). Since 90% of my groceries come from Trader Joes on my commute home from work, the occasional Costco or Whole Foods item is easy to catalog mentally.

Looking over the list I came up with, some patterns are clear, and not always consistent with how I picture myself as an eater.  Most notably, lots of dairy. Half and half for tea, low-fat organic milk for nightly cocoa, nonfat yogurt for fruit smoothies, favorite cheeses, and eggs are always in stock. Breakfast and snack foods get replenished frequently; so they make the buy-now list regularly. In contrast, meat rarely makes the list, coming home occasionally almost as an incidental.  And with the exception of spinach for salads and favorite fresh fruits for snacks, produce comes home without being summoned by a list. Whatever's in season and looks good hops into the basket (then the trick is to make sure to use it quickly, before it wilts or goes fuzzy in the crisper). As farmers market season ramps up here, it will be interesting to see if we use the master grocery list more or less than during the winter.

The flip side of the list's usefulness, once you've gotten good at avoiding waste from accidental over-buying, is making sure to keep key foods in stock. For me the biggest key to eating well is having the right ingredients on hand when I need them. That includes healthy snacks, fresh fish and produce, gluten-free staples, and basic ingredients for quick dishes made from scratch. If I run out of the good stuff, I'll default to whatever else may be handy, including all the processed packaged foods that shouldn't be in stock at home anyway. So I'm arming myself with a good list to help me make good decisions between runs to the store.

If you've tried an app you really like to help take this tip paperless, please tell us about it!