The Weekly Shop: Variety Without A Meal Plan

The meal prep article gives you four roles to fill — a protein anchor, a base, vegetables, and a fat source — and says the roles are the method while the specific foods are yours. This is the shopping half of that. It is not a list to buy and it is not a week's menu. It is what is actually in the aisles, so that filling those roles takes five minutes of thought instead of forty minutes of wandering.

Protein anchors, and they are in one paragraph on purpose rather than the plant ones arriving as a footnote. Chilled: chicken thighs and breast, turkey mince, pork loin, lean beef mince, salmon and white fish, eggs, cottage cheese, plain and strained yoghurt, halloumi, firm tofu, tempeh, seitan, Quorn mince and pieces. Tinned and jarred: tuna, mackerel, sardines, salmon, chickpeas, butter beans, kidney beans, black beans, green lentils. Dried: red split lentils, green and brown lentils, chickpeas, butter beans, soya mince. Frozen: fish fillets, prawns, chicken, edamame, soya beans, peas. Cupboard: peanut butter, oats, nuts and seeds. Some of these have a per-100g figure in the composition table in this app, with its source code beside it; the table is a short reference rather than a full database, and the pack in your hand beats both.

Two practical things about the plant column, neither of which is a knock on it. Most of it, pulses and grains especially, brings carbohydrate and fibre along with the protein, so the same amount of protein is a larger amount of food and usually a bit more cooking — a fact about the shopping rather than a verdict. Tofu, tempeh, seitan and soya mince are the compact exceptions. The other thing is that the amino acid make-up differs between plant foods, and the way that gets handled in practice is not complicated: eat a range of them across the day rather than building everything on one. Beans with rice or bread, lentils with pasta, soya and wheat in the same week. Most of the world has eaten this way for a very long time, which is why the pot dishes in the meal prep article are plant-based by default rather than by substitution.

Two rules make the shop go further and both hold whatever the prices are doing, which is why they are here and no prices are. The first: dried pulses go further per gram of protein than tinned, because a tin is mostly water, water is the heaviest thing in the shop, you paid to ship it, and then you pour it down the sink. Dried red split lentils are the easy entry point — no soaking, about twenty minutes on the hob, and they will thicken a pot of anything.

Dried beans are the exception that has to be done properly, and this is the one paragraph here that can make somebody ill. Dried beans, red kidney beans above all, contain a lectin that has to be destroyed by cooking. The Food Standards Agency's method is to soak them for at least twelve hours, drain and rinse, cover with fresh water, boil them hard for at least ten minutes, then simmer for around forty-five minutes to an hour until tender. Do not slow-cook raw kidney beans — a slow cooker does not get hot enough to destroy the toxin and can make matters worse. If that is more planning than your week has in it, tinned beans have already been through exactly that process, which is a good part of what you are paying for. Either choice is fine. Skipping the boil is not.

The second rule: every step somebody else has done for you is paid for per gram. A whole chicken against the same weight in diced breast. A block of cheese against a bag of it grated. Dried rice against a microwave pouch. A whole cabbage against a bag of it shredded. One big pot of yoghurt against four small ones. None of the convenient versions is worse food — you are buying labour, and it is worth knowing when you are. The counterweight matters more than the rule, though: the cheapest food in the shop is the food you actually eat. A bag of pre-chopped vegetables that gets cooked on Wednesday beats a whole swede that goes soft in the drawer, and a cooked chicken on a night when the alternative was a takeaway is a good buy at any price.

The freezer aisle is the most underrated part of the shop for anyone with an unpredictable week. Frozen vegetables and frozen fish are usually frozen within hours of being picked or caught, they need no planning, and they do not rot, so the bag you did not use on Tuesday is still there on Sunday. Frozen spinach, peas, broad beans, edamame, mixed veg, berries for the oats. Tinned tomatoes, tinned pulses, tinned fish. None of it is a lesser version of fresh; it is a different form of the same food, and it is why a stocked cupboard means you always have a meal.

Variety is the thing people ask for and then solve in the hardest possible way, by hunting for new recipes. Rotate inside the roles instead. Same tray bake, different spice. Same pot of lentils, coconut milk one week and tinned tomatoes the next. Same bowl, a yoghurt-and-lemon sauce instead of hummus. The meal prep article makes the point that two sauces turn three components into a week that does not taste like one meal, and that is the whole trick — four anchors, three bases, a drawer of vegetables and half a dozen sauces is already more combinations than there are days.

One number worth having, because it is the one most people in this country are furthest from and the remedy is always to eat more of something. The NHS puts the recommendation for adults at 30g of fibre a day, and notes that most adults manage about 20. Pulses, wholegrains, oats, potatoes with the skin on, nuts, fruit and vegetables are where it comes from, and the practical version is not a plan: a tin of something in the pot, the wholemeal version of the bread or pasta you were buying anyway, and leaving the skins on. If you are increasing it, do it over a couple of weeks rather than overnight — going from 20 to 30 in a single day is uncomfortable enough to put people off for years.

The last thing, and it is the one that genuinely changes depending on what you are doing. The same amount of energy can be a very different amount of food. That is just the arithmetic from the calories article, where fat carries more than twice what protein and carbohydrate do per gram, and water carries none at all. The direction that matters for most people reading this is the one Start Here names: if you are training four or five times a week and struggling to eat enough, appetite is your limiting factor, and a very large plate of very wet food will beat you. Milk, yoghurt, oats, peanut butter, dried fruit, nuts, tinned fish on toast, a bowl of dal — food that is compact, and food you can drink, gets the job done on a day when you are not hungry and still have to eat. That is a mechanism, not a promise, and it is the only direction we are going to write it in.

Cook the components, buy the frozen version of whatever you keep wasting, learn two sauces properly, and put a tin of something in most pots. That is the whole shop. Nothing in this article is a reason to eat less.