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Comment by skookum | Hacker News Reader

Often the healthy versus unhealthy discussion reduces to a home-cooked-from-scratch versus processed/junk food discussion. Having seen how my North American-raised Gen X/Millennial peers shop for groceries, I'm not surprised at the perception that the healthy option is more expensive. The predominant approach to home-cooking I see these cohorts taking is:

1) Find recipe 2) Make shopping list 3) Go to preferred grocery store and fulfill shopping list

This is a foolproof recipe for "more expensive". To eat healthy and maintain reasonable spending, grocery shopping needs to come _before_ recipe selection. One needs to go to the store, buy what's on sale (which is also frequently what's in season and thus probably more nutrient packed), and then build a recipe around that using non-perishable pantry ingredients. The cost difference between the two approaches will generally be at least 1.5X, and sometimes a lot more.

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On the other hand, shopping without a list can lead to significant food waste, unappetizing meals, and more impulse purchases.

In our home, we've learned to combine these approaches: use seasonal recipes as a general shopping list (you can "borrow" ones from Blue Apron, for example), then make substitutions as we're shopping based on what's fresh/available. Moreover, shopping for multiple meals at once allows for sharing ingredients between meals. Everything in the fridge "belongs" to a particular meal, so by the time we're done cooking them we usually have close to zero arbitrary perishables.

By cooking more and improving technique, you'll also get a sense of how to make sensible changes on the fly and be able to deviate further from recipes while still making a good meal, so there are further efficiency gains available.

> On the other hand, shopping without a list can lead to significant food waste, unappetizing meals, and more impulse purchases.

As long as you don't buy anything really unusual, you can throw it all in a stir fry once a week.

That sounds like an example of an unappetizing meal.

I think you're doing something wrong, or you just don't like vegetables.

Well, yes, I do imagine that somebody throwing everything that's about to go bad into a pan and calling it a stir-fry is doing something wrong. That was my point. I'd end up with lettuce, spinach, cilantro, banana and jalapeno stir-fries every week. I like all of those things as ingredients, but that sounds like an awful dish.

Then buy less of things that don't lend themselves well to this sort of contingency. Lettuce does salad, and nothing else; bananas are for being bananas, and desserts; if you don't happen to be in the mood for it, they're useless. But things like mushrooms, kale, spinach, leeks, onions, sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, cabbage, broccoli, asparagus, carrots, collard greens, peas, brussels sprouts, dandelion greens, cauliflower, celery root, sunchokes, and green beans- to name a few from the produce aisle alone that I can speak to from recent experience- work perfectly fine in stir-fry, so you wouldn't be limiting yourself too much.

I agree greens don't need to be limited... I do soups over stir fry, but similar... heartier greens like kale, spinach, arugula, etc can handle being cooked in with a soup. I tend to also use them in place of pasta in pasta dishes. That is sometimes a miss though.

I do make most of my own broths/stocks when I can... sometimes cravings for mushroom broth can be more expensive. There is definitely a taste difference between made at home and packaged broths... I'll use packaged, but not always a preference.

I also tend to taste the differences in meats more than veggies though... what they're fed seems to make some serious differences in flavor (wish they'd label that on chicken eggs)... I happen to like grain fed cows more than grass fed. It's pretty subjective though.

I do wish I was more of an early morning person, in order to hit up some of the farmers markets. Would be nice to find better connections for certain things I use more of.

Now you are "buying by recipe" rather than "buying by ingredients", which is where the conversation started.

That actually sounds like a decent pair of stir fries:

Lettuce + jalapeno + banana

Banana + spinach + jalapeno + cilantro

Banana is a bit of an odd ingredient here, but the key would be to cook it separately and very lightly, so it's more like a plantain.

A good technique while you're learning how to cook is if some combination of ingredients sounds dodgy, cook them separately first, then put small amounts together and see if it works as a dish. Sometimes it helps to adjust the ratio or add some seasoning.

Or freeze the banana and make bread later or a quick banana ice cream.

You wash the vegetables before they go in the fridge and don't store them in produce bags right? Maybe let the banana go brown then freeze, until there's enough for banana bread. Otherwise those ingredients can work in a stir fry, or even a curry.

FYI, taking the cilantro leaves off the stem and then freezing in a small plastic container seems to work indefinitely. Not quite fresh, but a whole lot better than giving up on cilantro because of the waste.

there are tons of "dish that works with a variety of different ingredients" recipes from various cultures. if you don't like stir fries, you can try curries, casseroles, bakes, pilafs, thorans, frittatas, etc, etc.

This. Or close to this.

Here's my followup to this approach:

- make whatever meals - chuck leftovers in bucket, put in freezer as they occur - make soup once a week using bucket and mixing in whatever broth you bought on sale last week

Sometimes it rocks, other times not so much. But it's always a good, hearty meal.

Can you tell why I never got married (walked once, stood up once)? :-)

>>Can you tell why I never got married (walked once, stood up once)? :-)

Not really. But it sounds like an interesting story if you care to share the gist of it.

Yeah, I used to piss in a jug next to my computer and I'm married with a kid now. Though I suppose if I was passionate about it and stuck to my guns with something like that I wouldn't be.

As an immigrant, I'd say you are definitely on to something here, with your 3-2-1 reverse approach.

In fact, if you look at a typical village in India, the housewife isn't going to have the time or means to "visit a preferred grocery store after making a shopping list" - the stores come to you! People live in narrow streets. On a given day, only 4-5 pushcarts can ply a given street. So the pushcart vendors decide among themselves which streets they will ply. Say you live in Street A. On a Monday, the carrot, tomato, potato, peas and beans pushcarts will visit your street. The housewife is now constrained by her daily shopping budget. The pushcart vendor is constrained by how much produce he can physically push on his cart. They are both constrained by the number of people living on the street & the haggling capacity of each person.

All of these constraints then resolve into which produce gets bought & in what quantity. Say the housewife ends up with half a kilo of beans and some tomatoes -> that day the family eats beans curry and some warm tomato soup for dinner. This is how we ate for decades back in India.

Once my mom came to the US on a vacation and I introduced to her the concept of eating-what-you-want and going to a Safeway and buying-tomatoes-in-winter-just-because ...all of that was pretty foreign & mind-blowing to her.

Even if you pick recipes first and shop second, I'd say that American home cooking is (monetarily) cheaper than buying prepared foods or even eating from the fast food dollar menu. A week where I don't cook is a more expensive food-week. When I was in graduate school I didn't have any weeks like that; it was too expensive to outsource my food prep to restaurants or manufacturers.

Home cooking can be costly in non-monetary ways: time, skills, variety (if you're on a really low budget). But my eyes roll pretty violently if I hear anyone opining that poor Americans have to eat potato chips because they're cheaper than raw ingredients. It's like they've never experienced or known even secondhand what food actually costs at Walmart. (Compare chips with a bag of actual raw potatoes, for example -- trivial prep (microwave whole after poking holes in the skin), less expensive to purchase by any measure, at least slightly more nutrition and roughage when you eat the skin.)

> less expensive to purchase by any measure

Where I see people argue this, the measure usually includes time and convenience of getting to the store, ability to store the food, etc. Have you heard the term 'food desert'?

Yes, living in a food desert makes eating well and affordably very difficult. It's unrealistic to expect people to make meals out of simple ingredients if they can't access the ingredients. Likewise a lot of good strategies are pre-empted if you don't even have a refrigerator.

I find the intermediate cases interesting. Food deserts and/or dire poverty (they overlap!) can narrate why large numbers of Americans eat poorly. They aren't a satisfying explanation for why many people with cars and refrigerators choose to buy frozen TV dinners instead of frozen ingredients one aisle over (or potato chips instead of potatoes, soda instead of black coffee...). I don't have a complete answer, but I'm trying to preempt an incorrect answer ("ingredients for home cooked meals cost more than processed food") by way of counterexample.

This study made quite an impression on me when it came out: http://www.academia.edu/454540/Dinner_Preparation_In_the_Mod...

Working class families that make heavy use of pre-packaged foods do not save money on meals or save meal prep time overall (though they reduced the "hands on" phase of prep). Pre-packaged foods did simplify shopping.

This points to a different set of drivers for processed foods than low sticker price. Making Hot Pockets relatively more expensive and fresh leafy greens less expensive isn't going to improve eating patterns much if (e.g.) people are eschewing home cooking to reduce cognitive overhead rather than to minimize the weekly food budget.

Well, processed foods might not reduce wall clock time, but because (as you mentioned) they remove the hands-on phase, it doesn't require the attention / human time. Surely if you pop a TV dinner into the microwave, you don't stare at the microwave for the next five minutes, waiting for your dinner to finish cooking?

There's also a secondary explanation that not everyone has access to a stove / hot plate and pots + pans (college students are a particularly salient example of this, especially when living in dorms). You could also attribute part of the preference for easy-to-prepare foods to lack of know-how (or even just perceived difficulty of prep) -- you'd be surprised how many people don't know how to do something as simple as fry an egg.

I'm a little surprised by the responses to your comment. I'm a classic tech bubble millennial, but I grew up with home cooked meals every night, and I thought the formula (for dinners in particular) was obvious: One protein, one starch, and one vegetable. Variations on this could be things like "taco night" or "pasta" (throw in some meatballs, canned sauce, and maybe veggies if you're fancy) or other deviations from the formula, but most dinners are protein/starch/veggie.

When you go to the grocery store, you buy as if you're planning on being lazy all week, and envision yourself opening the fridge thinking "Hmmmm, how am I going to do the protein/veggie/starch combo tonight?" Things "belonging to one meal" lead to food waste. You just need general patterns for whipping dinners together based on what you have, and what's going bad soon.

Vegetables: Frozen/canned veggies that you like, bag salads, a bundle of asparagus (just remember to actually cook it in the next few days!)

Starches: Potatoes, rice, (or potato flakes, and pre-boiled rice if you need something fast), mac and cheese in a box, a box of pre-mixed couscous, some frozen side dish you microwave -- whatever.

Protein: Meat, obviously. Chicken's easy to freeze and easy to roast. Steak when it's on sale, pork chops. Sausages if you're in a German mood. If you want to be a little more heart healthy, you can mix this up with some Eggplant parmesan, or... I don't know. I was raised by a Texan, so my powers are useless here.

Just buy everything in relatively equal numbers, buy groceries so they're half and half "eat right away -- will go bad" and "can stay in the freezer/pantry forever" so that your stock of food is never too badly out of balance.

I rarely ever shop with a "complete grocery list," just like my parents didn't (we need paper towels, eggs, bread, and... uh, food, I guess). I use recipes only on special occasions (You need an instruction guide to tell you how to roast a chicken?), and you just manage somehow. You don't need an app, you don't need someone to decide what your groceries are for you, you don't need to break out the recipe book every night -- you just freaking make dinner. Just like you take out the trash, you do the dishes, you vacuum, you make dinner. It's not hard, it just takes practice.

> I grew up with home cooked meals every night, and I thought the formula was obvious

Meal planning is just like a lot of things: When you learn to do it growing up, it _is_ obvious. When you don't, it isn't.

And some folks are very detail-oriented and others are chaos muppets. I grew up with a home-cooked meal every dinner, but all I knew was we had "a thing": burritos, fish, pasta, pizza night, pork loin, whatever. And then usually some kind of veggie my mom made me eat. But it was never remotely obvious that one of the items was a protein (if I would have even known what that meant as a kid), let alone starch. I'd say the only ingredient in a meal I ever thought about was the veggies, only because I didn't like them. Our meals were basically fixed and my mom always bought the ingredients for exactly what she was making; a meal she had made hundreds of times before.

The idea of mixing-and-matching and making ad hoc meals never occurred to me, and I'm STILL not good at it. It's usually my wife who is able to throw things together off-script, and it typically works. My mind is much more recipe- or routine- oriented -- which I suspect I share with much of the HN crowd.

Potatoes, rice, pasta, many root vegetables etc, can be bought in bulk when on sale. Buy the meat that's on sale that week. Buy the fresh veggies that are on sale that week. Pick a meat (or other protein), 2-3 veggies, and a carb, and that forms the bulk of your meals.

That assumes that you have enough spare cash to buy in bulk.

We never did this, because realistically it meant one trip to find what's in season, go home, find a recipe, then go back to get anything else we need.

Things got better when we tried a farm-to-table service that would deliver a box of veggies every week. That was essentially the first trip. Then we could plan out our meals and take one trip to the store.

We stopped the service because the quality of what was delivered...... varied. Greatly.

If you're missing an ingredient, just skip it or substitute it. Recipes are suggestions, not rules.

Problem is that knowing what can be skipped and what can substituted with what (and how) requires quite a bit of experience.

Not to mention the actual effect on taste. For instance, butter can be substituted for olive oil in many dishes, but the end result will taste very different.

knowing what can be substituted boils down to google and in lieu of an answer, making a guess and bullshitting your way through it. Most of my favourite meals are those made from bullshit because we were missing ingredients.

And it's not like having a single (or with leftovers couple) of sub-par meals is the end of the world... there are plenty of things prepared correctly that any number of people won't like or even try.

It's all experience... Also, watching a few youtube videos on sauce basics doesn't hurt, and will carry you a long way in terms of "fixing up" what you make to a level beyond steamed broccoli and baked chicken and potato. Again, it does take some practice, but not that hard really.

>made from bullshit

Well that doesn't sound delicious at all.

When I moved outside the US, I started going to the grocery store 2-3 times a week. This likely has a similar effect to the box service. It makes it really easy to get into a cycle where I'm generally buying meals based on the leftover vegetables from a different meal.

As far as what is in season, I'd suggest simply checking the ads. In the US, a lot of foods get cheap when they are in season. Here in Norway, the prices go up (Paying more for better quality due to it being in season). If you simply pay attention to this sort of thing for a while, you get the hang of it. Another method is to check traditional foods for the different holidays and seasons, as they are often centered around seasonal foods.

Why are you so rigidly fixated on following exact recipes, instead of just preparing what you have on hand? Of course that's going to be a recipe (heh) for cost and nuisance.

Or you can just Google a recipe that uses your ingredients. I've discovered many delicious combos this way.

I wonder if anyone has done any machine learning on recipe ingredients. Type in what you have available and it could come back with combinations that work. There are tons of recipe sites out there that training data could be taken from.

There's rigidly following a recipe. And then there's "I want to make some kind soup and I have nothing in the house that can be used as broth".

I keep most of the staples that don't go bad on hand, but there are plenty of recipes I want to make that don't have adequate substitutes because something I'm missing is a key ingredient.

/me takes on a dramatic tone

"Taco night was never the same after Shaftway tried substituting pumpkin for the tomatoes in the salsa..."

As someone in that cohort, who is learning how to "meal plan" this was the first thing I noticed. I have 0 concept of "what's in season" because I never think about it. I track my spend religiously, so I hope to see at least a ~20% reduction in spending with this approach.

I generally have no idea what is supposed to be in season at any given time. And while often I can infer what's in season - "Hmmm, asparagus has been 0.99/lb for the past few weeks, whereas normally it's around 3.99/lb" - the main point is that for many items, but especially produce, the price difference between buying what's on sale and buying what's on a pre-determined list can be large. The seasonality aspect is a bonus on top the price delta - it just happens that stuff that's in season tends to be in surplus and thus tends to go on sale more frequently during it's seasonality.

It depends on where you live of course, but the BBC one is a pretty good list.

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/seasonal-calendar/all

Is there a business opportunity? Someone could write an app that takes growing seasons and scraped grocery store price lists as input, and automatically generates shopping lists and recipes as output.

Before widespread urbanization, knowing growing seasons for specific produce used to be more common, but even today one can observe the way prices fluctuate at the grocery store -- despite extended growing seasons, other-hemisphere shipping, and greenhouses.

For what you're suggesting, price alone would be sufficient, no?

I think the biggest opportunity is in finding a group of recipes that uses up all the ingredients you buy in a single grocery run. If you use half an onion for something, you need to use the other half before it goes bad. This is especially true for perishable herbs, which usually come in large bunches and end up only being used once.

The traditional solution is to feed that half an onion to your pigs, and then later eat the pigs. Doesn't work too well in urban areas though.

My modern take on that is to freeze the half onion, then toss it in the pressure cooker when I have enough chicken bones to make chicken stock :)

Very few traditional home cooking recipes from any culture are particularly inelastic when it comes to ingredient quantities, especially for the fresh ingredients. I've never left aside half an onion unless it was expressly to have something to throw in an omelette the next morning. I routinely triple the fresh basil called for by recipes just to use the whole bunch, and have so far lived to tell the tale. Though maybe that I routinely double the garlic called for helps balance it, so I provide no warranty for anyone else. :)

http://foodful.ly/foodwaste_app.html

http://www.thegivinggardensproject.com/

These projects are attempting something along those lines. They're local to Davis CA, home of the UC which was once a dedicated agricultural school.

My ideal app for this is decades out. It's augmented reality based.

Something like Google Glass, scanning in real-time the food at a grocery store, identifying it (deep learning), and finding you recipes.

I agree, have healthy unprocessed food on hand, and adjust to what you have. Mollie Katzen, author of Moosewood Cookbook, and other cookbooks, talked at Google in 2013. I was fortunate enough to have had a long chat with her before she spoke, and I told her about my attempts to write software that would morph recipes to use what food items you have on hand. I mentioned that I was motivated to do this because my wife and I are very good at making up recipes to use what we already have. Mollie laughed and said that she enjoyed doing the same thing. A good skill to develop!

> software that would morph recipes to use what food items you have on hand

What are the best solutions for this currently? And are you working on a new solution?

My project is at cookingspace.com and I used to allow users to create accounts and register food on hand and filter recipes. I removed this feature about two years ago since only 1% of users used that feature. I kept the functionality of showing other ingredients that are not in the recipes, but "work" with a recipe. I base this calculation on 100K recipes and ingredients that are often used together.

I also show the nutrients for an entire recipe and nutrients per ingredient. I use the USDA nutrition database for this.

I hope to have time next year to both rewrite the web UI and improve the recipe knowledge base part of cookingspace.

> One needs to go to the store, buy what's on sale (which is also frequently what's in season and thus probably more nutrient packed), and then build a recipe around that using non-perishable pantry ingredients.

Agreed.

But this a complex problem.

First, we need the ability to scan food quickly, and know what it is. The Swiss have https://www.openfood.ch which is awesome, but that is just the Swiss. Alternatively, we could use our bonus card of the grocery store, or use OCR on the receipt. This'd give us the names of the ingredients at the very least.

Next, at a minimum, we need a way to detect and read the expiration date, allow to sort on this, and have some red/yellow/green markers for warning. On food, there is no standard for this as of yet. We'd need standards for perishable food like bananas and tomatoes. How long do those last? Perhaps ML/AI would be of help here.

I'd also argue we need food allergy warnings, but that'd be a feature for after 1.0 (just add a temporary warning).

We also need to store these ingredients in a database which is accessibly to the customers. I know some are thinking SaaS, cloud, etc but I prefer privacy TYVM. We need to be able to modify this database, and use say cron jobs for the expire date.

Next, we need the ability to connect this personal data -while containing privacy- with recipe databases (for which there is no open standard, and is pested with copyright), which would be used to match the ingredients which A) user has, and are to expire B) user prefers to use C) user doesn't mind buying. The suggestions to the user are based on ML/AI, but the user can set a day they want to 'experiment'; then a cuisine is selected the user normally does not follow (this last feature not for 1.0).

A later feature would give accurate feedback to the user how long the cooking is going to take based on ML/AI.

Finally, a backend with grocery store DBs is used, to order new ingredients/foods. This has support for price, brands, S&H, food allergies, shop opening time. Backorder support, suggestion support (together w/recipe backend).

(I ignored drones delivering the orders.)

Ambitious perhaps. Does any of this exist?

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