Some numbers on food

I tend to buy a week’s worth of groceries, plus or minus, every weekend. Sometimes I bike, sometimes I drive.

I realized, at some point, that I’ve really cut out all of the second derivative foods from my diet. Now things are just the raw ingredients, perhaps preserved. I’ve also been eating progressively less meat, such that I’m still within the realm of a person who does not need to take excessive amounts of nutritional supplements to get a balanced diet but such that I gain many of the health and environmental benefits that vegetarians are always talking about.

I noticed just how much time and space on the checkout line my veggies and fruits were taking up and how compact and tiny the meat I was purchasing for the week was. So I decided to put some numbers to it.

This is, of course, somewhat misleading, because I’m not including my use of staples, like oats and flour and rice. I don’t buy them every week but they provide for a good amount of extra carbohydrates for my diet. Thus, I suspect that the true kcal/$ is much higher once starch is considered, because I only purchased about 7800 kcal of food, which is not a week’s worth of calories for two people.

However, if you consider the existing calories/lb figures, you can see why I’ve been successful at losing weight. There’s about a pound per day of salad fixings there, all of which are low calorie density because they are loaded with bulk and fiber.