Spend Less and Tread Lighter by Examining Your Supermarket Habits

Off and on over many years, I've thought a lot about the modern phenomenon of the weekly supermarket shopping trip.

We know that most of the stuff on supermarket shelves is detrimental to our health, and that a lot of it is also terrible for the health of ecosystems, farming communities, and local economies. And we can see food prices rising as packets and bottles get smaller (or their contents do). And then there’s the cost of the fuel required for driving to the supermarket.

Whether we view it in terms of health, ethics, or affordability, it's making less and less sense to drive to the supermarket frequently.

When I first published this post in October 2022 we had been through (or were still going through) Covid and its effects on supermarket supply chains. Now, as I sit down to update it in July 2026, food and fuel prices continue to rise and climate, social, economic, and political instability continue to make themselves felt.

My sense of the importance of moving away from supermarket food, with its reliance on industrialized food production and all that goes along with that, toward real, local food has not diminished. In spite of many other challenges and distractions, this still seems to me to be an important issue. 

In the following sections, I'll share some of my thoughts about why we would bother taking on the challenge of pivoting away from supermarkets, and three ideas or tools to help you engage with it.

What would a "ditching the supermarket" map look like?

How can we find the time and develop the resources we need to become independent of the supermarket? How would we replace our weekly supermarket trip with affordable, local, healthy, ethical ways of sourcing our needs?  What would that even look like? 

I don't know the answers to these questions, but I do have some ideas about some basic principles we can apply to the process of figuring it out. I have three suggestions that I hope might be helpful. 

The first is that to make a map, you have to know the terrain. 

1. Start a notebook to track your supermarket habits

To get to know the terrain, we need to take a good honest look at where we're at right now, and what the habits and tendencies are that have put you there.

To do that it might help to have a way of keeping track of your supermarket-related habits. In my case, that means using a good old pen and paper. (There's probably also an ap for supermarket shopping. Being a total klutz in that department, I'll leave it to you to share in the comments if you know of one.) 

If you want to do the notebook thing (your brain works better when you write by hand, just sayin'), here's how you could go about it.

Get a dedicated note book or delineate a section in an existing one, and label it your "Supermarket Notebook" (or whatever). Then you can keep your shopping lists instead of throwing them away after each shopping trip (or not having a list at all), and you can gradually build up a record of your buying habits. Date each list, and scribble at the bottom what you spent. (When I first tried this, I used to staple the receipt to the page -- but the receipt fades quickly to where you cant read it, and it also gives off icky stuff that you absorb through your skin. So I don't do that any more). 

Keep the next page blank, for notes. That way, as you're updating your shopping list you'll have space to scribble down a few notes about whatever comes to mind that might be relevant.

You could keep a page of the note book at the beginning or end for a few notes about how  you’d like this journey to look, why its important to you, and/or where you’d like it to take you to.

If you're more of a spreadsheet on the computer person than a notebook person, you could try another idea I've used off and on over the years, which is a spreadsheet with columns like “fruit and veg,” “cold section,” “packaged/processed,” “bathroom,” “laundry,” etc. When I feel despondent about our ongoing supermarket reliance, a glance at some of those old spreadsheets reminds me how far we've come. 

Your notebook and/or spreadsheet can be like a “breadcrumb trail” to  help you get back on track when Life happens and you get derailed. 

2. Keep it small and be kind to yourself

Idea or principle number 2 is that it's important to be kind to yourself in this process. Here are some thoughts about doing that. 

One small bite at a time

Ditching the supermarket is a bit like trying to eat a whole elephant. You'll never get it done if you choke yourself on the first few bites. (Ask me how I know.) This is a long term process, and bigger or faster is not better. 

Take small bites, chew them mindfully, spit out the ones that don't work for you, and savor the ones that do. 

Savoring the wins

As you start using  a supermarket notebook, you’ll already have achieved something that’s worth a small celebration: bringing more mindfulness and awareness to your shopping habits. 

How will you celebrate this first, important step? Do something that lets your inner 5-year-old feel, "Yay Me -- look what I did!" You could light a candle at dinner time and explain to your family what you're celebrating. Or tell a friend over a celebratory cuppa (pick a friend who will listen, applaud, and not critique or insert their own life story). 

Celebrating your small wins lets the universe know, "this is important," and it reminds you, "I've got this."

Avoid letting  this become a "should" that you will eventually rebel against

For example, as you live your life, go shopping, and take notes about improvements that suggest themselves to you, restrain yourself from trying to do it all at once.

If you see two ideas you could implement this week, use just one of them, pat yourself on the back, and save the second one for next week. You never know, you might even build up a backlog of delicious ideas you can look forward to trying out 🙂

And finally, 

Let it go when you need to 

When life throws a curve ball at you, drop the supermarket thing so you can catch the ball. You have your breadcrumb trail (your notebook and/or spreadsheet) to come back to when you're ready to pick this up again.

3. Get clear on what you really need

The third idea or principle is that clarity really helps.

How come you buy that thing every week? How did that buying habbit start? Is it still serving you? And how many of the items in the trolley weren't on the list, but crept in there because the supermarket layout or their relationship to the things that were on your list suggested them to you?

We evolved as foragers in a world where calories and comfort were relatively hard to come by. Now, in a world that oozes convenience, we need to build (or perhaps rebuild) our discernment muscles. 

So, in pursuit of clarity, questions. Question everything, because there's always something to learn. 

In the context of writing a shopping list and shopping at the supermarket, I have two kinds of questions I ask myself about the products on the shelves:

1. questions about whether my family and I really need this thing
   
2. questions about who is influencing my thinking about this item

Lets take a look at both of these types of questions as they relate to our supermarket shopping habits.

Questions about whether you really need something

Ask yourself, “Do I/we really need this? What would happen if I didn’t buy this?”

If the answer is “Yes, I really need this,” then go ahead. Put it on the list, put it in the trolley, and move on.
(As time goes by your concepts of what you really need might change, but there’s no hurry. Remember, one bite at a time!)

But maybe the answer that comes up might be more like, “After a year of not buying this I would have saved a small fortune and kept a small mountain of trash out of landfill.”

If that kind of answer comes up, you know what to do. Leave  it off the list, and leave it on the shelf.

Questions about how you got the idea that you needed this thing

Many of the items on supermarket shelves are things our grandparents never heard of or imagined. They've become “necessities” today because of shared ideas that not enough of us are questioning. 

Now I have a surprise for you (not). Most of those shared ideas, if not all of them, were planted in the public psyche over the last 100+ years by clever, manipulative marketing. 

Who runs the marketing campaigns? Profit-focused global corporations. Not health-focused. Not ethics-focused. And not local. 

“Who says I need to put this thing in my shopping trolley? Is it someone who will profit from my purchase? Do they care about their impact on me/my family/my community/environment?" 

Whatever choice you make after listening to the answers to questions like these, it will be better informed than before you asked.

What do you think?

In conclusion, those are some things that go through my head when I ask myself, “how could we make it easier to begin (or continue) to de-throne the supermarket and its destructive supply chain and replace it with something healthier?”

I hope you've found this helpful or thought-provoking, and I'd love to hear your thoughts about it -- scroll down to the comments section below. 

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