What We Actually Buy in a Week Without Going to the Grocery Store

One of the questions we get most often is some version of:

“Okay, but what do you actually eat?”

Fair question.

Because saying “we’re not going to the grocery store for a year” sounds dramatic, but the reality is a lot less Oregon Trail than people imagine.

We are not living on canned beans in the basement.

We are not grinding acorns into flour.

And my children are not being handed turnips for snacks.

At least not yet.

The biggest shift has really just been this:

Instead of going to one store and buying everything we need in an hour, our food now comes from a bunch of different places.

And some of it comes from things I bought months ago and preserved specifically so Future Me would not completely resent Past Me.

So here’s what a pretty normal week looks like.

This is probably one of the easiest categories for us.

We buy meat directly from local ranchers, usually in larger quantities, and keep it in the freezer.

That means I’m not shopping for ground beef on Tuesday because tacos are on the menu.

I’m pulling it out of the freezer because we already have it.

That sounds obvious, but it has actually changed the way I meal plan quite a bit.

Instead of asking, “What do I want to buy this week?”

I’m asking:

“What do we already have, and what can I make with it?”

Which is probably how most people cooked for most of human history, but here we are, rediscovering it in 2026.

Our chickens handle a lot of this category.

Which is very convenient until they collectively decide they are on strike.

Then we buy from local farms or neighbors.

One thing this year is already teaching me is that food supply is a lot less predictable when it comes from actual living things.

Sometimes you have twelve eggs.

Sometimes you have three.

Sometimes every chicken in the county appears to have entered into the same labor agreement.

You adjust.

This is one of the categories that takes a little more planning.

We source what we can locally, whether that’s milk, cream, butter, yogurt, or cheese.

And when I can’t find exactly what I would normally buy at a grocery store, I either make something myself or use something else.

This is also where I’ve realized how incredibly spoiled we are by grocery stores.

You can walk into one building and choose between 47 different cheeses.

When you’re buying locally, you may have:

One type of cheese.

That is your cheese for the foreseeable future.

Honestly, there’s something kind of refreshing about it.

This is probably the category I make the most from scratch now.

We mill a lot of our own flour, so bread, muffins, cookies, pancakes, rolls, and other baked things happen pretty regularly around here.

This sounds very wholesome and organized.

It is not.

There is frequently flour on the floor.

But I do genuinely love this part.

There’s something deeply satisfying about turning wheat berries into flour and then into the bread your family eats.

Also, my kids would revolt if The Local Year meant no muffins, so this feels like an important public service.

Right now, we are in the glorious part of the year where produce is everywhere.

Our garden is producing.

Farm stands are full.

Orchards are open.

People are practically begging you to take zucchini.

This is the easy season.

And I am very aware of that.

We eat what is growing now, buy extra when something is abundant, and preserve as much as I realistically can.

That means freezing, canning, freeze drying, fermenting, dehydrating - basically anything that lets September food become February food.

Because February Ashley is going to have significantly fewer options. And much hungrier children.

This was one category I knew I needed to think about early.

Kids want snacks approximately every fourteen minutes.

And grocery stores are extremely good at making snacks convenient.

So we keep things like homemade muffins, fruit, yogurt, cheese, meat sticks, popcorn, sourdough crackers, freeze-dried fruit, and whatever baked thing I made that week around.

Some weeks I am very prepared.

Other weeks everyone is standing in the kitchen staring at me like I have personally failed to maintain civilization because there are no granola bars.

Balance.

This is where the experiment gets interesting.

Things like flour, sugar, salt, spices, oils, coffee, chocolate, rice, and other staples don’t necessarily come from our immediate area.

Our rule here is not “everything must be grown within 20 miles of our house.”

That would be nearly impossible and also means I would have to give up coffee, which was never under consideration.

For things that can’t realistically be grown here, we try to buy more intentionally.

Direct when possible.

Small producers when possible.

Local businesses when possible.

And we use what we already had before the year started.

Again, this is an experiment in changing how we source food.

It is not an experiment in unnecessary suffering.

The biggest surprise is that finding food has not actually been the hardest part.

There is a LOT of food around us.

The harder part is convenience.

Grocery stores are incredible at removing friction.

You can decide at 4:30 p.m. that you want tacos and by 5:00 you can have tortillas, avocados, salsa, cheese, sour cream, cilantro, limes and three kinds of hot sauce in your kitchen. (Thanks, Instacart!)

When you step outside that system, you have to think further ahead.

You need to know what’s in your freezer.

You need to know when the farm stand is open.

You need to bake the bread before you need the bread.

You need to preserve strawberries when strawberries exist.

That has probably been the biggest adjustment so far.

Planning. And with full time work, two children, lots of sports and a real menagerie of pets, that part gets tricky.

I am thinking about food differently.

I notice what’s in season.

I know where more of our food came from.

I’m using what we have before buying something else.

I’m getting better at turning ingredients into meals instead of shopping for meals.

And our food feels a little less anonymous.

And from here, I’m going to start sharing a weekly Local Year update with the much less polished version of all of this:

What I baked.

What I preserved.

What snacks I made.

What we bought.

What actually worked.

What absolutely did not.

What happened in the garden.

What recipes we loved.

And whatever food-related crisis I created for myself that week.

Basically, the real-life version. Because real life is unpredictable and messy and unplanned. And interesting.