The Shopping Dilemma

One of the perennial difficulties, it seems, of living alone is the whole business of food shopping.  I have long bemoaned the fact that things that have a short shelf-life have to dominate the menu from the day they are bought until they are used up.  The alternative is to build into one's budget - indeed into one's whole philosophy - the fact that enjoyment of a lone portion of commodity X will involve double the normal portion cost and the waste of half of the minimum buying quantity.

I enjoy a cheese and cucumber sandwich, for example.  My normal sandwich intake is one (i.e. one slice of bread, folded) per day for my lunch.  At this rate, half a cucumber - the minimum that can be bought, and that already more than half the cost of a whole one - would last at least a fortnight and economy would require that I have the same thing for lunch every day.  I fear loyalty would almost inevitably succumb to boredom.  The same pattern applies to a number of other perishable pleasures.

The other shopping feature to which I react with mixed feelings is one that has become quite popular in recent years: BOGOF, or 'buy one, get one free'.  Sometimes it gets modified to offer two for a reduced price, with that reduced figure being the one prominently displayed.  Hence the eye catches the headline '2 for £2', but if you only want one, you find that you'll have to pay £1.67.  My argument against this 'bargain' is one of storage.  Many such offers I will take advantage of, on the basis of welcoming the saving on something that I may well use over a number of weeks, but in other cases I just don't have space, e.g. in my fridge or freezer, for a larger quantity than I need in the immediate few days.

My local favoured supermarket is presently undergoing refurbishment.  Now, I understand that, when many shelves are on the brink of being shunted and perhaps some lines are being moved to another area of the store, on-shelf quantities might be reduced to make this easier. The occasional 'out of stock' I can live with.  But some items I buy regularly have disappeared completely ... and not for just a week or two; in the case of one particular type of cereal, I've not seen any sign of it for a month or more!  Has it been decided not to stock it?  Is it, in fact, no longer being produced?

A particular line that forms a regular part of my eating pattern is vegetable rice.  It's one of a range of four own-brand rice products of which a 105 gram packet is just right for a single portion.  These cost 47p.  This week I had to resort to a branded variety - just as good, I'm sure - which comes in a 250 gram packet, labelled 'makes 2 portions'; this sells for £1.55 which, by my reckoning is 38% more expensive, in addition to providing a larger portion (I'll come back to that shortly) and posing a storage problem.  It seems that the whole packet, once opened, has to be cooked at once so I shall have to find a space to store a cooked portion until I next want to eat it ... at the very least the next day.  It hardly makes for a balanced diet!

By way of a footnote: Tuesday of this week would have been my silver wedding; in point of fact we were divorced over twenty years ago.  One bone of contention during that time was the imbalance between, on the one hand, complaints about my increasing weight and waistline and, on the other hand, my wife's habit of making my portions larger than hers and then, when she had eaten her fill, passing the uneaten part of her meal onto my plate.  This was then followed up by a protest that I hadn't eaten all of 'my' dinner.  My complaints fell on deaf ears and, sad to say, often led to a row.

While I'm happy that, in my father's words, "Them days are gone!", it seems that food problems will continue ... perhaps it will always be so.