For all too long, that´s what my grocery shopping went like:
Go to the closest supermarket, grab one of their oversized shopping carts, and fill it to the point of overflowing with all those delicious-looking things they had for sale.Then haul it to my car, squeezing in the four to five bags of merchandise such a cart amounted to, drive it home and drag it up the stairs to my flat. Then try to squeeze all of it into my fridge.
Most of the time, that meant removing at least one trash bag full of expired items first.
At the time, I thought that was the way things were if I wanted my pantry to be well-stocked all the time.
Well-stocked, to me, meant having any item I might wish to eat in the house all the time. So, I took home ten different kinds of cheese, because I couldn´t know which one I´d want to eat the next day, could I? Or three different loaves of bread, or five kinds of yoghourt, or six different packs of sausages.
All of these, of course, are highly perishable items, with a shelf life of sometimes less than a week. Having all of them in my fridge at once meant I could either eat them before they went bad, or I´d have to throw away what I couldn´t eat in time.
So I ate as much of them as I could and threw away the remaining packages as soon as they expired.
Just how dumb can you get? I regularly spent way too much money to buy too much food, ate too much "to keep it from going to waste" and still ended up having to throw away too much of it.
The force driving that insanity was fear. I was afraid that I might want to eat a certain food and find myself out of it. I imagined that I would, in that case, completely binge on whatever else I had on hand. The overstuffed fridge meant security. It also meant that I could make my eating decisions at the spur of a moment, eating whatever I happened to have a yen for.
It also meant I got fatter and fatter abusing my body as a bipedal waste bin gobbling down foods about to expire.
When I started out on my weight loss journey two years ago, the first thing I decided on was a grocery shopping ban. I found out that I could live off what I already had in my fridge for several weeks before I had to go shopping again. With reducing the size of the portions I ate came the realization that I can really fit everything we need to eat in a week into just one of those reusable shopping bags.
I had to give up the idea of having everything always available for that, of course. Now, I have to decide when in front of the cheese shelf whether I want to eat gouda or emmental cheese that week, or in front of the yoghourt shelf whether I want greek or strawberry that week.
Guess what, I did not binge the first time I had a yen for camembert cheese, but only gouda in the fridge.
I just ate a piece of gouda, and - stopped eating. The world didn´t end.
And the next time I went grocery shopping, I was free to decide whether this week´s cheese selection would be camembert or something else. As far as I remember, it was something else.
It does not matter whether I have a special food on hand or not, as long as I have enough to eat.
It does not matter if the fridge appears half-empty, as long as what´s in there is enough to feed us until the next grocery shopping day.
I took a long time to arrive at those conclusions. Absurdly so. But arriving at them has meant cutting down on our grocery bills, by more than half, and cutting down on food waste, too.
What my obsession with being stocked up fully with all my favourite foods has cost the environment before I saw the light, I cannot know. What I do know is that now I buy only as much food as will be consumed, and the amount of things we have to throw out because they have spoiled has gone down to almost zero.
And I feel a lot better for it. When I am not thinking about how much food and money I wasted over the years before I realized what I was doing wrong, that is, because then I could kick myself for being stupid.
Julia
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