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US consumer food waste runs about $762 per person per year — roughly $3,000 for a household of four. Where it goes and how to get it back.

Grocery inflation is back at its long-run average, but prices are ~25% above 2020 and aren't coming down. Why the bill still stings, and the changes that move it.

Food waste is a systems problem with four causes. Here's the fix for each, plus the single habit that attacks all of them at once.

A five-step weekly loop that starts from your kitchen instead of a recipe: take stock, anchor on what's expiring, plan for your real week, buy only the gap, freeze the overflow.

Fresh herbs, salad greens, berries, mushrooms and fish die in 2–3 days. Pantry staples last years. Here's the sequencing that decides whether you eat your groceries or bin them.

Every recipe-cost calculator online is built for restaurants. Here's the four-step household method — price as purchased, divide by real servings, and add the part you threw away.

Cooking is cheaper, but by less than the usual comparison suggests — because takeout has a waste rate near zero and groceries don't. Here's the comparison that matches your bank balance.

Fruit and vegetables are about a third of household food waste; dairy and eggs another fifth. Consumers never eat an estimated 41% of the fresh produce they buy.

Duplicate buying is a recall problem, not a discipline problem. Four fixes, starting with making your shelves visible from the aisle instead of trying to remember them.

Most lists are built forward from recipes and subtract nothing. A gap list inverts the order — inventory first, plan around what's expiring, write down only the difference.

A four-week protocol using a note on your phone. Record what you bin, what it weighed, roughly what it cost — nothing else. Most people find their real number is triple their guess.

A definition: expiry-first meal planning chooses what to cook in the order your food spoils, rather than in the order you picked recipes. What it requires, how it differs from recipe-first planning, and where it fights you.

A planner that spends your grocery budget should be one you can check. What determinism actually buys you, what it costs, and the one place we do use a model.

A definition: a gap list is a shopping list containing only the difference between what your meal plan needs and what's already on your shelves. Why it can't contain duplicates, and which step decays first.

Six meal planning apps with prices taken from the vendors' own pages where we could load them, labelled secondhand where we couldn't. Written by one of the six, and it says so.

Supercook is free and answers 'what can I make right now.' Cupboard keeps a persistent inventory with expiry dates and plans a week against it. Different questions — here's how to tell which one you're asking.

A meal-planning subscription runs $10–60 a year, or about $120 if it's monthly SaaS — so it has to save you $0.20–$2.30 of food a week. Here's how to check whether your kitchen clears that bar, and the households where the answer is no.