A weekly shop fails in a predictable way. You buy for the person you intend to be, that person does not show up on Wednesday, and by Sunday half the vegetable drawer is a science experiment.
Write the list from meals, not from categories
"Vegetables, chicken, something for breakfast" is not a list — it is a mood. Decide the actual dishes first, then let the ingredients fall out of them. The difference matters because a dish tells you the quantity, and a category does not.
Reuse every ingredient at least twice
This is the single rule that cuts both the bill and the waste. A bunch of parsley bought for one dish rots; the same bunch across three dishes disappears. When you pick the week's meals, look for overlap on purpose — same base grain, same herb, same tin.
Sequence the week by how fast things die
Fresh fish and leafy greens go early in the week. Root vegetables, cabbage, carrots and anything frozen hold to the end. If you plan the salad for Saturday, you are planning to throw it away.
Build the plate before the trolley
A simple structural check beats a nutrition app in the shop: does each meal have a protein, a vegetable and a starch? Harvard's Healthy Eating Plate2 is the one-picture version, and the WHO healthy diet guidance1 covers what to keep an eye on across the week — salt, free sugars, and the kind of fat.
The unglamorous part
Wash and cut the vegetables the day you buy them. It takes twenty minutes and it is the difference between a bag of spinach that gets eaten and a bag of spinach that gets apologised to. Nobody chops a cabbage at 8pm on a Tuesday.
