In late February of this year, a writer named Cordelia Ainsworth, who lives in the north end of Halifax, Nova Scotia, decided to stop doing a weekly grocery shop. She had been doing one for twenty-two years, with the consistency of a tax obligation, and she had begun to suspect that the weekly shop was the reason her cooking always felt like an obligation too.
Cordelia is 53 and lives alone in a two-bedroom apartment on Gottingen Street, above a hardware shop. She works from home as a magazine writer. She had been doing her grocery shop on Saturdays at the Atlantic Superstore on Joseph Howe Drive, for an average of about a hundred and ten dollars a week.
The shop took her about an hour and forty-five minutes when she counted the drive, and she had, increasingly, come to dread it.
Her experiment, which she planned for three months and which ran from the first of March to the end of May, was to buy only what she needed for the next day, and to buy it on foot from the small shops within a six-block walk of her apartment.
There are, by her count, eleven such shops. A small grocer that carries good produce. A fish shop. A halal butcher. A bakery on Agricola Street. A health-food store with bulk grains. A small Asian market with reliable tofu. A liquor store. Two cafes that sell good bread. And two convenience stores, useful for forgotten staples.
The first week was, she said, deeply uncomfortable. She kept reaching for things that were not in the fridge, because they used to be there on a Monday. The fridge itself looked alarming. It contained, on the first Tuesday, a single onion, a quarter of a loaf of bread, a small piece of cheddar, three eggs, and a jar of mustard.
She did not, however, go hungry. She walked four blocks to the grocer at 4:30 in the afternoon and bought a head of broccoli, a chicken thigh, and a small bag of potatoes for the night's dinner.
By the second week, the discomfort began to give way to something else. The daily decision of what to cook had become, in a way, easier rather than harder. She was no longer choosing from the contents of a fridge that represented a Saturday plan she had made under fluorescent lights eight days ago.
She was choosing from what looked good in the shop that afternoon, at the price the shop was charging that day, for the meal she actually wanted to eat that night.
The cooking changed. She had thought, beforehand, that the daily shopping would lead to more elaborate cooking, because she would have fresher ingredients. What actually happened was the opposite. The cooking became simpler.
A whole fish bought at the fish shop wants very little done to it. A bag of mussels wants white wine and garlic. A bunch of asparagus from the grocer in late April wants olive oil and salt and ten minutes in a hot oven. There is a kind of confidence, she found, that comes from a single very fresh ingredient that does not need to be elaborated upon.
The fridge, after the first month, settled into a steady state of near-emptiness. On a typical evening, it held the next morning's milk, some butter, an open jar of pickles, a few condiments, and whatever was left of dinner. The freezer held a half-loaf of bread and a small container of stock.
Cordelia tracked, with some interest, what she actually spent. The daily shopping came out to about ninety-five dollars a week, slightly less than the weekly shop had cost. This surprised her. She had expected the small-shop prices to be higher.
She thinks the savings came from not buying speculatively. She no longer bought things she might use, because she would only have to use them by the end of the week and she did not know yet what she would want to eat by then.
She also threw away almost nothing. In the three months of the experiment, she estimates she threw out a head of lettuce that had gone soft, one half-bag of arugula, and the heel of a baguette that had become too dry to chew. That was the entirety of the waste.
The compost bucket under the sink, which used to be full by Friday, was now full about once every nine days.
There were downsides. The daily walk to the shops added, on average, twenty minutes to her working day. On rainy days, this was unpleasant. On one particularly icy day in early March, she ate scrambled eggs and toast for the third night in a row because she did not want to go out.
She also missed, occasionally, the pleasure of opening the fridge on a Wednesday and seeing it full of the week's potential. There was a small loss of abundance.
But the gains, for her, outweighed the losses. The dinners were better. The relationship with the small shops was new and pleasant. The hour and forty-five minutes of the Saturday morning shop was now available for other things, which mostly turned out to be reading the newspaper at the cafe on Agricola Street.
Cordelia is still, three months after the experiment formally ended, shopping daily. She has made some accommodations. She buys bulk staples — flour, oats, rice, dried beans — once a month at the health-food store. She does a slightly larger shop on Saturdays when she is hosting friends.
Otherwise, the fridge stays mostly empty, and the cooking stays mostly simple, and she has not, on any night since the experiment began, dreaded the question of what to make for dinner.
