Most grocery lists on the internet are aspirational. They run to forty items, four of which you’ve never cooked with, and they assume a store you don’t have anywhere near you.
This isn’t that kind of list. This is what’s in our cart most weeks, from an ordinary supermarket. It’s short, it’s repetitive, and the repetition is the point.
The short answer: A working plant-based grocery list has four jobs to fill. Something starchy to build the meal on, a legume, vegetables, and enough seasoning to make it all taste of something. Everything else is optional. Most households rotate one to three breakfasts, two to four lunches and five or six dinners, so the list stays roughly the same from one week to the next.
The Grocery List, by What Each Thing Is For
Starches, which are the meal itself
These carry five to six hundred calories a pound, where vegetables carry about a hundred. That difference is the whole reason a plate of vegetables leaves you hungry at nine o’clock and a plate built on one of these doesn’t.
- Rolled oats
- Rice, whichever whole variety is cheapest that week
- Potatoes and sweet potatoes
- Whole grain pasta
- Whole grain or sourdough bread
- Quinoa or buckwheat when we feel like a change
The four numbers behind that are here, and they’re the most useful thing we’ve ever learned about eating.
Legumes, which are the reason it holds
- Red lentils. No soaking, twenty minutes on the stove. If beans are new to you, start here.
- Green or brown lentils
- Chickpeas, dried and a few cans for the days we didn’t plan ahead
- Black beans or white beans
- Split peas
- Tofu, and tempeh now and then
Two tablespoons of beans a day is associated with a 7 to 8 percent lower death rate, across five separate populations on different continents. If there’s one line on this list worth acting on, it’s this one.
Vegetables, chosen for how long they last
- Onions and garlic. Chop them and let them sit for a few minutes before they go in the pan. The sulfur compounds that make them useful only form once the cells are broken open, and if you put heat on them right away, that reaction stops.
- Carrots and cabbage, which keep for weeks in the fridge
- Whatever leafy green is cheap that week: kale, chard, spinach, collards
- Something cruciferous: broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts
- Tomatoes and peppers when they’re in season and cheap
- Mushrooms
- Frozen spinach, peas and broccoli, which never spoil and never sit there making you feel guilty
The cruciferous line deserves a sentence of its own. Three servings a week of cruciferous vegetables specifically was associated with a 41 percent lower prostate cancer risk, where twenty-eight servings a week of vegetables in general was associated with 33 percent. In other words, which vegetables you buy matters as much as how many of them you buy.
Fruit, kept for between meals
- Bananas
- Apples. Dutch researchers followed 20,069 people and found that apples and pears stood out for stroke risk specifically.
- Oranges, or whatever citrus is in season
- Frozen berries, which are cheaper than fresh and no worse for you
- Dates, in small quantities, for sweetening things
The cupboard, which is what makes it taste of something
This is the section people under-buy, and in our experience it’s the reason a lot of plant-based cooking tastes of nothing for the first two weeks.
- Canned tomatoes, both chopped and pureed
- Vegetable stock
- Tahini, and peanut butter with nothing in it but peanuts
- Soy sauce or tamari
- Lemons, and apple cider vinegar. Acid at the end of cooking does much of what salt does, from a different direction.
- Nutritional yeast
- More spices than feel reasonable. Cumin, paprika, turmeric, garlic powder, cinnamon, chili. Most people under-spice by about half.
- Ground flaxseed or chia
The Aisles We Walk Past
A grocery list is defined as much by what’s missing from it as by what’s on it, so here’s what we don’t buy.
- Oil. This is the one that surprises people, and for us it’s a health position rather than a budget one. Our reasoning is here. We sauté in water or stock, and we roast on parchment paper.
- Meat substitutes. Expensive and heavily processed, and beans do the same job for a fraction of the price.
- Powders. Protein, greens, superfood blends. We wrote about the protein ones specifically.
- Health bars. Dates and oats in a wrapper, at several times the price of dates and oats.
- Juice. The fiber is what makes fruit behave like fruit, and juicing takes it out.
Two Things Worth Buying That Are Not Food
Vitamin B12. Not optional, not negotiable, and not expensive. Anybody eating exclusively plants needs it, and so does anybody over 50 whatever they eat, because absorption declines with age.
Vitamin D, but by test rather than by default. Plant eaters and meat eaters are at the same risk of being low, so get the number before you decide.
Venny here. Those two are the only supplements I’d put on a general grocery list. Multivitamins are a separate conversation, and often not a helpful one. Even if you take one, you’re still better off getting your folate from greens and beans than from a tablet, because that way it comes with everything else, and greens and beans supply folate in abundance.
What We Do With It When We Get Home
Almost nothing, and that’s deliberate. We cook one pot of something, and we cook more of it than we need. A cooked grain, a cooked legume and something roasted go in the fridge, and the rest of the week runs off those three.
That’s the whole system, and it’s the reason the list above never gets any more complicated than it is. A few of the things it turns into most weeks:
- Easy Red Lentil Soup
- Bean Stuffed Sweet Potatoes
- Quick and Easy Stir-Fry Noodles
- Chocolate Overnight Oats
- Five-Ingredient Hummus
Venny is a medical doctor and a dietitian; Andy is a psychologist. This is general information rather than medical advice, and anyone taking medication should involve their own doctor in any dietary changes.
And, always, seek health consciously.
