Why would you want to grow your own food?

In this series of posts we're focusing on reducing our reliance on supermarkets and industrial food for lots of reasons. Some of the main ones are to reduce our costs, to improve our nutrition, and to tread more lightly on the earth.

In case you missed the previous posts in the series, they are:

3 Supermarket Strategies to Help You Spend Less, Tread Lighter, and Live Better

Strategy #4 – to Help Parents Spend Less at the Supermarket

Strategy #5 – What’s Shaping Your Grocery Shopping Habits?

Strategy #6 – Wise Use of Whole Foods

This post - Strategy #7 - is about replacing some of your supermarket needs (in small steps) by making a start on growing your own food.

If you’ve never grown anything before, or if you live in an urban environment without access to garden areas, take heart. There are easy, small ways to start -- including if you are short on time, space, or confidence.

I've listed the following suggestions roughly in order from easy towards more challenging. We'll begin with what must be the simplest, cheapest, quickest way there is to get started growing a little bit of fresh food in your own home. 

Start sprouts in a jar on your kitchen bench

Sprouting seeds, grains, and legumes is a simple process that takes no more space than a kitchen draining board. It's a way that you can use indirect sunlight and moisture to increase the volume, digestibility, and nutrition levels of seeds, grains, and legumes.

All you need is a clean jar, a piece of loose weave fabric or netting, a large rubber band or some string, water, some indirect sunlight, and some edible seeds grains/legumes. (Preferably organic and definitely not treated in any way that would stop them from sprouting.)

At its most basic, sprouting goes like this: Put a small amount of seed or grain in the bottom of your jar, cover with water, and leave for up to 12 hours (less for smaller seeds).

Cover the mouth of the jar with a fabric or net that will hold the seeds and release the water; drain. After that, rinse and drain your seeds at least every 12 hours, keeping them moist but not wet. Watch for them to start to sprout, which should happen within a day or so. Keep rinsing and draining till the sprouts are the size you want, and viola: homegrown food!

You can use your sprouts in lots of ways: toss them into a stir fry, add to salads, add to sandwiches, blend them up in smoothies... 

Food that grows in soil is always my preference, but sprouting is hard to beat if you're short on space or time or you just need a not-too-daunting way to get started growing something.

A how-to resource and a word of caution

There are a different soaking and sprouting times for different sizes and types of seed, and its good to be sure you're not letting your sprouts get slimy or moldy - for details, this post is a comprehensive  guide covering pretty much everything you could want to know.

The only thing I would add to it is a word of caution about soy, which I suggest you avoid entirely, and other legumes, which I suggest you cook after sprouting.

(See this article by environmental journalist Tara Lohan about soy effects on human and environmental health and how soy got so big, this one about soy farming as a deforestation driver, and this one about soy in processed foods, if you're keen to know more about why I suggest avoiding soy.)

All other legume sprouts, in my opinion, should be cooked before you eat them. All legumes are hefty to digest and some more so than others -- cooking them after sprouting gives you double insurance that you'll get their health benefits without an upset tummy.

Kidney beans are particularly tricky according to some sources, so give those a miss unless you've done your own research and you're confident you know what you're doing. 

Other than the legume family, if you can sprout it you can probably eat it! Have fun experimenting, compost your failures learning experiences, and enjoy your successes

Grow edible things in containers

(Or your could grow drinkable things in containers -- see the section below for ideas on that.)

The great advantage of growing food plants in containers is that, well, they're contained. So they're more manageable than even a small garden plot. Small and manageable is good, because we need strategies we can maintain.

If you're doing this for the first time and you can afford to buy seedlings and potting mix, do.

Or you can get off to a slower but much less expensive start by starting your own seeds and making your own compost and potting mix, which is beyond the scope of this post but isn't as hard as it might sound. You can also get creative with finding free containers, such as unwanted polystyrene boxes, instead of buying pots.

Whichever way you go about it, start small and then build slowly, so you don't get overwhelmed. 

Greens and herbs of many kinds are super easy to grow in pots, and so long as you feed them, keep them moist, and can put them where they receive enough sunlight, the more you harvest the better they grow.

Learning about ways to feed your potted plants can be a whole other adventure, just as composting can -- there's so much to learn and explore.

But for now, just start. If its really daunting, limit yourself to starting with ONE pot. The first time you snip some chives to add to a bowl of soup -- even if the chives came already potted from Bunnings and the soup from a can -- you'll have started growing your own food. Anything's possible from there. 

Grow low-maintenance perennial herbs and make chilled teas

Growing something you can drink counts too.

Do you buy soft drinks, carbonated water, cordials, or fruit juices? Consider replacing them with teas made from things that grow in containers (see above) or in your garden. (Actually, its only called "tea" if it includes leaves from the tea plant Camellia sinensis; otherwise its proper name in herbal lore is a "tisane." But we'll stick with "tea" to keep things simple.)

Any herb you collect fresh from your containers or your garden to make tea with will be way healthier for you than herbs grown in mono-cultures, packaged, and transported. And don't even get me started on the sugar content and other non-food ingredients in bottled beverages. And, on top of all that, there's the cost savings.

Chilled herbal tea examples

If you live in a more temperate region with proper winters, here's a list of 18 herbs for you.

Let's start with ginger tea. (I wrote a detailed post about growing ginger here.)

Grate fresh ginger rhizome into a heat proof jug or jar (scrub it clean first, but no need to peel) and pour boiling water on it. Let it steep for as long as you like. Overnight is fine (it will be stronger, so you can dilute it more and it will go further) and ten minutes is fine too.

Add honey (its easier to dissolve if you add it when the tea is still a bit warm, but I don't add while its hot because I use live, raw honey, and I don't want to destroy its goodness with heat).

Then chill, dilute to preference (I put a bit in the bottom of a cup and add water; my husband drinks it straight), and enjoy as a refreshing, healthy, thirst quenching drink. 

Another plant you can use to make a refreshing chilled tea is Mexican tarragon, which I wrote about here.

Another is lemon grass (Cymbopogon citratus), a low-maintenance tropical perennial which also does ok in a large container if you need to bring it in to protect from frost. It has a slew of health benefits you might not have known about (I didn't).

Yet another is hibiscus (Hibiscus sabdariffa) -- yes, hibiscus flowers that we grew up thinking were just for decoration can be made into a healthy tea.

There are many more, but that should get you started. Now you can skip the bottled beverages section next time you're down that aisle.

Next, another kind of drink. 

Make kombucha 

Kombucha is regular sweet black tea that has been converted to a fermented beverage . It's cheap to make and is a delicious and healthy replacement for sweetened drinks.

What transforms the sweetened tea into a sugar-free probiotic (and puts this in the "homegrown" category) is something that grows on top of the tea, called a Scoby. Scoby stands for "symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeasts." Fear not - they're all friendly varieties that build healthy gut flora in humans.

It takes a bit more to learn kombucha making than it does for herbal tea, so rather than try and condense it here I'll share a basic resource to get you started.

By drinking kombucha regularly (especially if you also eat un-pasturised sauerkraut and/or un-pasturized yogurt/kefir) you can scratch probiotic powders and pills off your shopping list too.

Grow tough, easy fruit/vegetable climbers in narrow spaces

This is really an extension on the container growing section above, except that now instead of talking "balcony or porch," we're talking about narrow places where there's not much space but what there is goes all the way up.

Plants like cherry tomatoes, regular climbing tomatoes, peppers and capsicums, egg plants, pepinos, cucumbers, peas and green beans, and probably more that aren't coming to mind, can all be grown in containers and trained up trellises to make use of vertical spaces.

Other, more rambling vines that we think of as space hogs can be used cleverly, too, for example by allowing them to grow up a trellis and then over a pergola or car port. Chokos, pumpkins, and passion fruit come to mind.

Sweet potato vines can be grown in a large pot to give space for tubers, or a smaller one if you plan to just eat the vine tips as a nutritious green vegetable. 

Chokos are less nutritious, but so easy once you get them going. I wrote about 7 Ways to Use the Humble Choko Vine, here.

Even pumpkins can grow on trellises. I always fear that the vine won't hold that heavy fruit up in the air, but it does. And pumpkins can also be harvested before they're large, and be cooked and eaten like you would a zucchini. In my experience small unripe pumpkins are interchange-able with zucchini in the kitchen, and a LOT easier to grow.

Grow mushrooms

Full disclosure: mushrooms in my experience haven't been the easiest things to grow. I can't (yet) count them among my successes. But so far I've only made a few attempts, and I'm not giving up because mushrooms are SUPER nutritious and many types are also safely medicinal.

I believe that food should be the first place we turn when we need medicine. And I'm convinced that food from our own immediate environment is a significant key to building our health and resilience, so we can reduce our reliance on pharmacies as well as supermarkets. Mushrooms are such super-foods that no matter how many times I fail at growing them in abundance, I intend to persist till I crack it. (It's mainly a case of moving it up the list of priorities...)

Anyway, if you're keen, consider starting with a kit the first few times to dip your toes in. There are lots of mushroom growing kits out there; search online for "mushroom growing kits" in your area. 

And while you're waiting for your kit to sprout, you might like to check out these online courses, the first one free and the other so reasonably priced that its almost a no-brainer.

Free Mini-Course: Get started with your Mushroom Growing Journey

Grow a Mushroom Garden at Home: an Online Course

Or search for another mushroom growing resources that tickle your fancy - they're springing up everywhere (pardon the pun).

Grow edible insects in a tub on a bench

The insects in the picture are silkworms, which are easy to raise on mulberry leaves at home. Many other types of insects can also be raised at home -- as food for you, your chickens, or your fish.

Around 2 billion people, world wide, eat insects.

Yes, we picky folks would need to get past the ick-factor.

And no, insects aren't pettable.

But if you have serious space constraints and you can get past those two hurdles, you could produce your own ethical, high-quality, super-local, balanced and complete protein at a fraction of the cost of any other comparable protein source, on a bench in a corner.

No, I haven't tried this personally yet. (At least, not for human food. We've had a few goes at growing black soldier fly larvae for chicken food and fish food, but we're still very much in the learning stages.)

But if I had no space to raise other kinds of livestock and I couldn't afford to buy ethically raised meat, I wouldn't hesitate to put "learn how to farm insects for food" at the top of my list of priorities.

I don't believe that fake meat from a lab is the answer to any of our meat-related challenges. Nature placed insects near the base of all food chains with the same exquisite wisdom she applied to the rest of her Creation. I would much rather eat insects as designed by Nature than meat designed in a lab.

So. If that tickles your fancy, here are some resources to explore:

Insects are delicious and nutritious

Farming Edible Insects - hello zero footprint protein

12 Garden Insects You Can Eat

And if you're not keen right now, that's ok. File it away at the back of your mind for if you ever do need or want to explore it.

TAKE ACTION

Ok. That was lots of ideas. But ideas are utterly useless without action.

So don't close this tab until you've chosen one thing to take action on. The very first thing that pops into your mind as you mentally scan back through this list -- that's the one.

If you’re new to growing your own food:

• Choose an option and take a first step to get started. You could note in your notebook (from the first post in this series) what you need to do next to keep moving, but do that after you've taken action. 
• If you have to look something up, limit your research so you don't fall down the rabbit hole and never make it out! Just look up the basics so you can get started.
• Consider what basic supplies you’ll need and add them to your shopping list if you can't find them in your house.
  

If you’re not new to growing your own food:

• Chose one thing you’re growing but not making very good use of. Ask yourself, what would I need to do differently to bring this food from where-ever it grows, into my kitchen more regularly?
• Or, What one thing is there that I'm not growing yet but would like to?
• Or, What one thing I'm already growing would I like to grow more of, so I could use it more often?
• The best way to get better at growing your own food is to make it as easy and simple as possible to eat something--anything--directly from your garden on a daily basis.  “One Garden Meal Per Day” expands on that idea.
• The eBook  "One Small Serve" describes a selection of low-maintenance, nutritious perennial plants and ways to build a "one serve at a time" food growing habit that's small and simple enough to maintain -- including for someone who knows that gardening will never be the center-piece of their life.
  

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This is the next in a series about reducing your reliance on supermarkets and industrial food. In case you missed the others, they are:

3 Supermarket Strategies to Help You Spend Less, Tread Lighter, and Live Better

Strategy #4 – to Help Parents Spend Less at the Supermarket

Strategy #5 – What’s Shaping Your Grocery Shopping Habits?

There was a time when our family was completely reliant on the supermarket. We had no idea where our food was coming from and we were powerless to take care of our own basic health needs or to do anything about rising food and fuel prices. 

Today we eat in ways that are much healthier and more economical both for us and for the places and communities our food comes from. And if extreme weather were to cut off our family's access to town, we'd be able to go for many weeks (barring serious accidents) without needing the supermarket or the pharmacy.

A big reason for all of that (besides our efforts over the years to learn to grow lots of our own food and to use simple, natural remedies to take care of our health) is that we've learned to reject convenience foods and replace them with carefully selected and prepared whole foods, which is the topic of this post. 

What would be helpful?

Before we go on: this post is in the nature of an overview, with some hints and tips thrown in. You may find this is enough to prompt ideas or jog you into action to take more steps on your own journey. 

But if you find yourself wanting more detail, please comment at the bottom and tell me what would be helpful for you. In the coming months I'll be investing thought and time into creating more practical, step-by-step, "hand-holding" style resources and I'd love to hear what would be most helpful to you for where you're at right now. 

With that said, let's get started...

Why buy whole foods?

Heavily processed foods, obviously, give you heaps of convenience. You get to eat them right out of the packet or with very minimal preparation. But convenience foods also cut you off from nature, from the sources of your food, and give you:

• less nutrition,
• more additives,
• more packaging,
• higher cost per meal,
• less empowerment (convenience foods are habit forming in two ways: 1, their ingredients interfere with your body’s innate intelligence about what is good for it, and 2, you come to rely on them as a quick fix ),
• gradually declining health and energy levels, and
• the nagging awareness that you’re buying from giant conglomerates that are squeezing the life out of farming communities, and the biodiversity out of ecosystems, around the Earth.
  

In the long run you're paying for that cheap convenience with your health and well-being, not to mention what industrially produced and processed foods do to our ecosystems and communities. 

When you buy whole foods, you do have to prepare them yourself. There’s no getting around the fact that in order for you to eat nourishing food that doesn’t cost the Earth, some planning and organization is required on your part.

But that's really the only downside, and I've found that it's at least as much about planning and organizing as it is about spending more time in the kitchen.

And in my opinion, it’s worth it. When you do put in the effort to buy more whole foods and learn to use them, you’ll get:

• better nutrition (so much so that its impossible to state the difference in one small bullet point)
  
• gradual restoration of your body’s innate intelligence about what you need, vs what the food industry wants you to want
• a feeling of empowerment: as you learn to use whole foods you'll also be learning to be more in charge of your own eating habits, enjoyment, and health, and less reliant on anonymous giants who have no interest in your health
• a sense of satisfaction in knowing you’re taking better care of the Earth just by how you eat
• a sense of re-connection, perhaps even of home-coming, as you engage with your food closer to its source
  
• positive knock-on effects in other areas of your life as all these things begin to strengthen you in subtle ways

A whole food example

Here’s an example from my life of buying a whole food and using it in ways that help me feed my family well without spending my entire life in the kitchen.

I buy organic brown rice and cook 1 to 2 kg of it at a time. 

Whole grains are more nutritious than processed ones, but they can be problematic to digest and get the full nutritional benefit from unless we know how to prepare them properly. So I have a preparation and cooking process for brown rice that involves a few steps and some forethought and planning.

The process requires my presence in the kitchen, but not a huge amount of hands-on time; I can be doing other things while the rice is doing its thing. 

The result is cooked rice that’s highly digestible and nutritious, keeps well in the coldest part of the fridge, and can be used in different ways as a base or a side in a variety of meals.

I don't bother freezing it (in fact I'm not sure what freezing would do to its texture); in nearly 15 years of doing this I've never had my cooked rice go off before I could use it all up in my family of four. 

A few other ideas

Legumes

Legumes/pulses (such as dried beans or lentils) are relatively economical to buy.

(Unfortunately, pulses/legumes are among the crops routinely sprayed with glyphosate--Round Up--to desiccate them before harvest so it’s important to get them organic if you can manage it. The increased cost of organic pulses brings us closer to what real food really costs when farmers reject the industrial cheap food model and insist on something healthier. And on the upside, dried legumes do keep – so once you're comfortable using them you can consider buying organic in bulk for a better price. Best of all, if you live in parts of the world that grow them, buy your legumes directly from a farmer and cut out the industrial supply chain altogether.)

Like whole grains, it’s important to learn how to prepare legumes before cooking to increase their digestibility. Once you have the hang of it, legume preparation fits in with other kitchen routines and the pay-off in improved nutrition is well-worth it. Left-overs from bulk cook-ups of legumes can be refrigerated, frozen, and used in a myriad of ways in subsequent meals. Wisely prepared and combined with other whole foods, legumes can be a simple and nutritious whole-food staple in your kitchen.  

There’s even a recipe for chocolate brownies that uses cooked dry beans in place of flour. Search the internet for “recipe for black bean brownies” and you’ll find a plethora of options. (I credit Katie at KitchenStewardship.com for first introducing me to this idea, and she’s an excellent resource for all things whole food, real food, and healthy eating.)

Cooking in bulk for frozen meals

When you go to the effort of cooking any meal that can be frozen, cook much larger amounts and freeze some for easy, home cooked “convenience meals” on other days.

Cooking veggies in bulk

When you cook any kind of veggie, Its almost always worth doing double or triple, or as much as you can fit in whatever cooking vessel you're using.

The excess can go into bubble and squeak, frittata, be reheated under the grill and served topped with grilled cheese, or be quickly reheated in a fry pan and served with fried eggs on top or scrambled eggs mixed in.

Having already-cooked veggies at hand makes it easier to increase your veggie consumption, something most of us could do with, and it's hard to go past the all-around nutrition of a pan of fried garden greens and homegrown eggs.

(It’s really ok, even beneficial, to cook and reheat your veggies, including greens. Read more here about cooked vs raw.)

Teaming up with a friend

Team up with a friend, cook in bulk, and swap portions. You and your kids will appreciate the variety, and you’ll get ideas to expand your own repertoire.

Take action 

If you’re not already practiced at bypassing processed foods, here are some action steps for you to try... 

• Sit down with a cup of tea, your notebook, and Google (or preferably Ecosia.org rather than Google). 
• Choose just one type of whole food that appeals to you, to work with initially. If you need to, look up the basics for how to store and prepare that food. Scribble down 2 or 3 meals in which you could use that food as a main ingredient over the coming week, or whatever time frame makes sense for you. 
• Put that food item on your shopping list. Then prepare it in a basic way and in sufficient quantity for the 2 or 3 meals you listed. (Don’t buy it in large bulk quantities yet, and don't cook any one meal in bulk for freezing until you're confident your family will eat it happily - The last thing you want is a freezer full of meals your family won't eat.)
•  Pat yourself on the back. You’ve just prepared the foundation for several meals and taken a step away from reliance on convenience foods.

If you are already practiced at bypassing processed foods:

• Take stock of your meal planning as it relates to your supermarket habits: Are you already doing all you can to streamline your processes? Are you as efficient as you can be? Are there any areas where you could work smarter instead of harder?  What about nutrition, are there areas where a little more attention to detail might yeild a boost in nutrition?
  
• Pick an area (just one!) where you know you can do better, and note down what action you want to take.

You're not trying to be super-human

Remember, no matter where you are on this journey, you're not trying to be super-woman or super-man. The objective is just to live a life that feels as right to you as can be.

In the context of your current circumstances, and with the goal being health for your family and for the ecosystems and farming communities that feed you, what could feel a little more “right” for you? 

Start there.

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This post is about how our social routines and our physical environments shape our grocery shopping habits and nudge us in our buying decisions. Once you see these influences at work in your life, you'll be able to respond to them in more deliberate ways rather than just being prompted by them without realizing it.

This is Strategy #5 in a series of strategies for reducing our reliance on the globalized industrial food system. If you haven't read the previous two posts in this series please do that first, then come back to this one. The previous posts are:

1. "3 Supermarket Strategies to Help You Spend Less, Tread Lighter, and Live Better"
2. "Strategy #4: to Help Parents Spend Less at the Supermarket"

Who is in charge of your grocery shopping habits?

We think we're running our lives with rational thinking, logic, and will power. But studies show that in actual fact our environment has much more influence on our behavior than we realize. (I wrote about how our environment can distract us from our goals or guide us toward them, here.)

We'll start this post with some examples of how our physical and social environments shape our habits. Then we'll look at how the environment inside the supermarket is designed to prompt us to buy more, and I'll share a specific example of how a family routine was prompting me to go shopping more often than I needed to.

Finally, I'll give you some suggestions for how you can make use of all of this and become more aware and deliberate about your shopping choices.

How our environments shape us

For a very obvious example of how our social environment can support or hinder us in making changes to our behavior, think about a habit like smoking. If you were a smoker who wanted to stop, it would be essential to put yourself in environments where no-one else smokes. Hanging around with smokers would make it extremely difficult to break the habit and sustain the change for the long term. 

Our physical environment shapes us too, literally as well as figuratively. For example if you took all the raised seating out of your living area and replaced it with a mat and cushions on the floor, you'd gradually adjust to sitting on the floor with associated changes in posture, flexibility, and mobility over time.

James Clear, author on habits and behavior change, calls this “choice architecture,” and says it’s “the number one driver of better habits.” (He should know; he wrote a New York Times best seller on the topic of how to change our behavior.)

Marketers know all about how our environments influence our behaviors, and they make full use of it. In the next section, I'll show you how the environment inside a supermarket is specifically designed to prompt you to buy more than you had planned to when you walked in there.

How "a few things" becomes a trolley-load

Everything about the way supermarkets are laid out and the ways the shelves are packed is designed to prompt you to buy: 

• the size of the shopping trolley (research shows that you buy more if your trolley looks empty)
• delicious bakery smells wafting over you as enter, to whet your appetite for all the foods you're about to be choosing
  
• fresh fruit and veg near the entrance to give an impression of healthful freshness that lingers for the rest of your visit and to give you the feeling that you've already selected healthy stuff, so further along it's ok to indulge in a few extra "treats"
  
• placement of specific items at eye height for you and your kids 
• the placement of items on hooks that protrude out a little from the shelves and are a different, but related, category to the other items in that aisle 
• stacks of snack foods at the ends of the aisles - high traffic areas that you can't avoid passing by
• and of course, at the check out, the magazines for you to help yourself to as you wait in line to pay, and the sugar snacks for you to pick up since you're now hungry and light headed from all the stimuli you've just been subjected to

If I were a supermarket manager, perhaps I'd make similar decisions. I hope I wouldn't, but then I'd probably go broke or get sacked. I'm glad I'm not a supermarket manager. 

***

The next section is an example of how our weekly family routine was putting me in close proximity to the supermarket which was prompting me to go shopping twice as often as I needed to, and what I did about it. 

How a good book is helping me take care of my grocery shopping habits

This example showed up in my Supermarket Notebook a while ago. (I introduced the idea of keeping a Supermarket Notebook in Strategy #1.)

First, some context: we live in a rural area and we’re home educators. Our daughter does dance lessons every Tuesday afternoon during school term, which is a reason for a weekly town trip. During school holidays, there’s no dance class so there's no regular weekly requirement to go to town.

Now, to the point of the story: a while ago, I realized that during school holidays we only go shopping about once every two to three weeks. But, during school term we seem to need to go shopping once a week. On dance class day. Now isn't that interesting?

Being in town on dance class day, in close proximity to the supermarket, was prompting me to “just go in and get a few things.” And then before you know it, "a few things" turns into a trolley-load. Which, as we discussed in the previous section, isn't by coincidence.

Now, I go shopping every second week, at the most, all year round. But how did I break the habit of weekly shopping during school term?

Every second week when I drive my daughter to dance class, I take a good book. I park outside dance, let my daughter out, then lean the seat back and take out my book. (Ahhhhh... I LOVE a good book. And as I said in this post, reading is a great way to immerse yourself in something that makes you feel good.)

So there I stay, reading my book rather than marinating in marketing messages, until it's time to drive home. I save on fuel and grocery costs and I get to relax for an hour and a half that I would otherwise have spent running around shopping. 

Necessity is the mother of invention

This strategy helps me re-affirm to myself and my family that we don't need the grocery store every week. Our efforts at growing some of our own food, making our own bathroom and cleaning products, and generally being as frugal as we can, are all paying off.

But what if it doesn't work? What if you get near the end of the "non-shopping week" and realize you forgot to stock up enough on this or that, and now it isn't going to last until the next shopping trip?

Necessity is the mother of invention. By putting yourself in this predicament you have actually set up your environment--specifically that empty spot on the bathroom or pantry shelf or in the fridge--to prompt you to be more resourceful than you otherwise would have to be.

The consumer economy wants you to be reliant on shopping frequently. But you don't have to be. You can train yourself, gradually, to be less and less reliant on the quick and easy fixes that are dangled in front of us like peanuts for monkeys.

Take action

Understanding why supermarkets are set up the way they are enables us to avoid falling for the trickery quite so easily. And seeing how our behaviors are linked together in our routines enables us to tweak our routines to support the kinds of behavior change we want in our lives. 

Here are some suggestions for ways to use your Supermarket Notebook (from the first post in this series) to figure out how you're currently being influenced and decide what you want to change about that. 

1. Think about what prompts you to go grocery shopping as often as you do. Are there things in your physical environment, your family routines or your social routines that make it easy or logical for you to go on certain days? Do you really need to go that often? Could you consolidate your trips so that you go less often, shop more efficiently, and build your "resourcefulness muscles" between grocery shopping trips?
   
2.  Think about how your buying decisions are being influenced once you get into the supermarket. Go through the list above, of ways that the supermarket environment is set up to influence your choices. Which ones have you been falling for? Remember, they're subtle. They're designed to work without you being aware of them. What can you do to make yourself impervious to them? (There are tips in Strategy #3 and Strategy #4 that might help.)
3. Scribble the answers to all these questions on the Notes Pages in your Supermarket Notebook. You haven't tried to change anything yet. Just begin by getting it all out on those pages so you can see what's really going on. Gradually (give it time) you'll see ways you might be able to make changes. Write those ideas down as they come to you. 
4. Try one idea at a time (remember Strategy #2, take it in small steps) and write down the outcomes so you'll have a record of what you've tried, what helped you spend less or shop smarter, what didn't, and what you learned in the process. 

An important tip is that useful, actionable answers may not come right away to the questions you ask in your notebook. Be patient. Ask again next week, and the week after, until gradually the answers and insights start to flow. Give yourself time to find ways to make positive changes to your routines and habits that will really stick. 

References and resources

Here are two short videos, (each a little over 2 minutes) and a short read (less than 2 minutes) about how supermarkets are designed, from a consumer advocacy website called FoolProofMe.org, who suggest that we "make healthy skepticism a habit" in this commercialized world.

Are You Being Super-Marketed at the Grocery Store? - video

The Untold Truth About Grocery Stores! - video

The Low-down on Super-Marketing - short post

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In a recent post, “3 Strategies to help you spend less at the Supermarket,” I said I believe we can gradually re-build food sovereignty in our local communities by making tiny shifts in our thinking, values, and habits.

These are shifts that help us move away from the supermarket giants towards healthier, more ethical, and still affordable ways of sourcing our needs. I see them as very effective because they address several needs at once:

Furthermore, we're addressing these needs while doing something we'd be doing anyway: feeding our families. 

Envisioning the food system we want

Many people have already made big shifts. For example, one reader who commented on the last post has drastically cut her supermarket reliance by shopping at the local co-op and using a local milk man and green grocer.

That’s an inspiring picture for us to hold in our minds. Imagine if, in every neighborhood, you could trade eggs for excess greens with a neighbor, receive your milk from a farmer you know by name, and shop for your other needs at a local co-op, knowing that your dollar helps keep it thriving¹.

Lots of neighborhoods don’t yet have access to food systems like this. How do we build them?

I don’t have a quick and easy answer, unfortunately. But I do feel sure that if we just do what we can to put one foot in front of the other toward more localized and ethical food systems, things will shift. It's not possible or necessary to have this all sorted out by lunchtime tomorrow.

Just to be on the look out for what steps you can take and to take them when you can, is enough. 

So, with that vision of healthy food systems in mind, here is another strategy to help you on your journey of small steps away from industrial food and toward healthy, ethical food. This strategy is especially for parents.

(Please, if you haven't read the previous post with the first 3 strategies, do that first. Then come back to this post.)

Strategy #4: Set yourself and your child/ren up for success before you leave home

What could you do before you leave home, to set yourself and your children up for success at the supermarket? Your exact answer will be unique to you and your children, of course, but here are some ideas and suggestions to get you started.

Scribble one or more of these down in your Supermarket Notebook (from Strategy #1) and make it happen next time you go shopping.

Eat before you shop

If you can, eat a decent meal before you go shopping. At least have a snack that wont spike your blood sugar and then leave you feeling hungry an hour later. The reason for this is that the last thing you want to be feeling as you push that trolley along the aisles is hunger or light-headedness. Hunger triggers buying decisions we otherwise wouldn't make.

Feed the kids too! And/or consider having healthy snacks for them in your handbag that you can reach for if you need to. If your child has a snack to much on, especially an interesting one that they don’t get very often, they’ll be less interested in snatching things off the shelves.

When my kids were little, one of the first items I would buy at the supermarket was a small packet of soft cheese for them to much on as they sat in the trolley. I would keep the empty packet, and pay for it at the check out counter along with everything else. It was a special treat that the kids loved, it kept them occupied, and it didn't spike their blood sugar or excite them.

Supermarket-only toys

Consider keeping a  supermarket-only toy ready for your small child/ren that’s just for playing with while they’re sitting in the shopping trolley. It’s difficult to compete with the novelty and glitz that a small child sees in a supermarket, but a toy that’s just for her, that she never sees any other time, will help a bit.

(One word of caution: I never used screens as toys or distractions for my kids. Now that they’re older they use the computer to research things they are interested in and to do creative work, but they have never used screens for gaming or socializing. In fact, the creators of digital products expressly say that they don’t allow their own kids to play with them -- which should be instructive for the rest of us!²)

Enlist the kids' help instead of fighting with them

Have a plan for how your older child is going to help with the shopping rather than hinder it. If the child is old enough, consider giving him his very own short list of items that he is responsible for noticing and putting in the trolley. The list can grow as his capacity grows.

A child who feels that their contributions are valued will be much more cooperative than one who is constantly hearing, “No! Don’t touch that! Put that back!”

Be clear

Be clear with your kids before you leave home about why you’re going to the supermarket.

(Hint: it’s not to spend your heard-earned money on spur-of-the-moment purchases and strange substances masquerading as food, to line the pockets of wealthy executives at the expense of your health and well-being.)

Consider having a short family meeting, perhaps during a meal the day before you go shopping, where you assert some variation of: “Here’s what is on our list. We are only going to buy anything that is not on our list if it meets such and such criteria.” An example of the criteria might be: it’s a real food or a needed product that is on special and has a good use-by date.

Your kids won't remember the details the first few times you do this, but it will be clear to them that you have a plan. And s/he who has a plan invariably gets to lead the way.

Building self-directed lives

Even very young children will gradually take all of this on board. You’ll be shaping their supermarket expectations ahead of time, which reduces disappointments and friction.

You’ll also be teaching them something incredibly valuable: how to hold to a meaningful course of action rather than be swayed by the noise and distractions that are aimed at parting us with our our money and our ability to lead a self-directed life that respects other lives on Earth.

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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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