I saw ‘a week without shopping‘ on eGullet. Basically, eating out of your pantry and skipping your usual trip to the grocery store for one week.
I normally grocery shop once a week. Sometimes it’s a big trip and I stock up on pantry items. Other weeks, it’s mostly meat or poultry and fresh produce.
It sounds like a good idea to save money and to not waste what you have. Plus I think I could get Pat to go along with it.
A few months ago I read Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet and really enjoyed it. A couple journalists decided to only eat food grown in a 100 mile radius of their home. Overall it worked out pretty well although they did actually loose weight at first. They started in winter and it might have been easier to start in the spring or summer so they could can and store food for the winter.
I like to try to eat locally. I enjoy hitting the farmer’s markets and there some great ones in Chicago. I think you can really get the most nutrients out of vegetables and fruit the fresher they are, besides the greeness of it all. However, Pat pretty much flat outside that completely converting to the 100 mile diet wouldn’t fly. He rarely has that strong an opinion about groceries so I let that go.
hmm, it sort of makes sense: because sometimes I forget about the things I have in my pantry. But sometimes I also like to go to the store and just pick up a few random things as a treat 🙂
I have a habit of buying things at the grocery store or food shops that look interesting or I had read an article on that are not on my list. Sometimes I end up having cool stuff in the cupboard but not using it for a few months. I think it will be good for me to look in pantry more often.
I like this post a lot – I feel like I should be up to the challenge of NOT shopping for a week, I’m gonna try it!I did an Eat Local Challenge once – in April! It was HARD! It was also the “Pennywise Eat Local Challenge” – where you’re on a strict daily budget. I totally lost weight on it – it’s hard to find local carbs, so it was essentially an Atkins style diet.
[…] I am avoiding buying groceries (sort of on a whim without planning 2 wks worth of meals), I had to make substitutions. I changed […]
Hi there. I just wanted to let you know, further to your blog post from February, that we are going to do another eGullet week without shopping starting Monday. When we launch, we’ll have a special URL: egullet.org/dontshopnow — at the moment this will only lead to the February topic but when we go live it will lead to the current one. Stay tuned… All the best, -Steven