The Grocery Challenge

Beauty that Moves blogger Heather Bruggeman has set herself a challenge this month:  cutting her grocery bill in half!  Citing her reasons and the specifics here, Heather invited her readers along for the challenge.  I thought it was a great opportunity to take a closer look at our grocery budget and meal planning, which is still a new habit for us.  Without trying to specifically slash our own budget in half, I am trying to cook out of the freezer and pantry more this week.  This means pasta (white beans and spaghetti, cauliflower and spaghetti), oatmeal (cooked oatmeal, granola), and soup (leek and potato, butternut and apple)--all relatively easy and uncomplicated, with ingredients I have in stock.

But the larger grocery challenge (that Heather herself embraces) is the one that I pose, with varying success, to us every month:  local, seasonal, homemade, organic, whole foods as unprocessed as possible.  Some weeks we do better than others.  So far in October, I give us a low B (hmm, if A- is an Asian F, what is a B-?).  With my injections and recovery, we've been doing a little bit more processed food and take-out than usual.  But I found motivation in the oddest of places-- a physical anthropologry/evolutionary biology treatise on the meaning of cooking for the evolution of human beings,  Catching Fire:  How Cooking Made Us Human by Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham.  To summarize it succinctly, cooked foods gave our remote ancestors more energy because they could digest them more easily which in turn allowed them to have smaller guts but bigger brains more geared to social interactions.  Voila, modern humanity (by way of the campfires, pair-bonding, and kinship groups).  There's more to it than that--lots of great stuff about the biology of raw foodists (who would die in the wild), how chimpanzees and gorillas differ in their eating habits, the archaeology of fire control, the evolution of the division of labor by sex (and why women do the household cooking in all societies!) and how cooking established the always uneven economic relationship of men and women, even the physics of digestion and how cooking plays a huge part.  I highly recommend it.

In the epilogue, Wrangham takes on what this means for us today, that mainly our evolutionary predisposition to prefer and efficiently utilize cooked, refined, high-energy foods has led to the so-called obesity epidemic. What was great for our ancestors is no longer good for us.  And while he wouldn't advocate the Evo or Paleo diet (which he dispatches in the very first chapter), Wrangham implies that less refined, whole foods are what will give us another 1,000,000+ years at the top of the food chain. (And he doesn't begin to touch environmental sustainability. . . .)

And that's a grocery challenge, for sure.