Considering processing time from pickup, not including driving (since I almost never drive just to get food), all the way to food ready to eat, we (two parents of one child) spend eight to ten hours a week.<p>Grocery shopping, again excluding travel, takes one to three hours a week. Once a month I put together a bulk order through the local food cooperative. I consider this time well spent, as food (along with sleep (preferably in a stable home), exercise, social interaction, and a sense of purpose) is so important to a healthy life.<p>I look forward to planning and making each day's meal from raw ingredients, using the leftovers for lunches and sometimes subsequent dinners if I made enough or too much. It's a relative luxury that I wish more people had access to.
As little time as possible.
I hate grocery shopping more than any other adult life admin task. I maybe spend 1 hour every two weeks as a serious grocery shop.
However, because of my ADHD, despite having a shopping list, I almost always forget something. Or multiple things. So I end up having to make numerous mini-trips between shops, where even on my mini-trips, I usually forget something.
How is this possible to be so disorganised while attempting to be organised? Well, despite having a list, and a meal plan, I seem to get so distracted by the background music of the supermarket, the other people shopping (who sometimes do weird stuff if you watch them), interesting items that I’ve never noticed before, analysis paralysis when there are different flavours of the same item, or different brands of the same item and I’m trying to decide which is the best deal, or likely best quality, all combined with an overwhelming urge to leave the shop as quickly as possible because I just don’t care that much about buying food… until some point later when I realise I’m actually hungry.<p>I go through phases where I just bulk buy eggs and porridge with the plan of just eating the same thing every day for two weeks so I don’t have to think about what to eat. But then I get bored of eating the same thing.<p>Thankfully my work provides us with free fruit, vegetables, milk, bread, cheese and crackers, and unlimited coffee. So I can get away with being disorganised.
I spend about an hour a week at the grocery store. I bring my 3-year-old with me, and she brings her own little shopping cart and helps pick out what we buy. I think of it as a fun bonding activity and an opportunity for her to get exposure to a wide variety of food, rather than a tedious chore to be optimized. Sometimes she picks out weird fruits and then refuses to eat them, but overall I think it has helped broaden her food horizons.
Never really quantified it; I'd say a few minutes in the small crap Tesco on my walk back from work a few times a week. Maybe once every two weeks I venture to the larger, slightly less crap, Tesco (all Tescos are a bit crap, but they seem to have colonised my immediate area very thoroughly; there are at least six in walking distance), which is 30 mins walk away or 10 mins on the bus, and spend maybe 15 minutes there, to get stuff that the local one doesn't have.<p>In principle, I could get deliveries, but honestly I like the excuse for the walk.
Why?<p>I'd give more time to groceries if the experience of gathering them resulted in better nutrition, fun, and groceries existed in a third place that I really enjoyed like the old working space I occupied for a few years.<p>I guess the subtext is that I improvise groceries. I don't orchestrate them. I suspect consumer personas pivot on this inflection point around groceries. It's worth studying DFW "This is water" for context.
I have never thought to time it, but I would guess that my daily visits to the co-op grocery around the corner typically last about ten or fifteen minutes, not counting the walk.