Unsupported Speculation

or Easy Randomization Schemes while Grocery Shopping

I wanted to write a little about how I purchase two-weeks worth of ingredients for dinners so that I minimize how often I have to place an order from Instacart.

But before I get into that, I want to mention that for breakfast I dislike having to cook for myself for it, and so I use a DASH Rapid Egg Cooker, a toaster, and a microwave to cook two eggs, two pieces of toast, and two pieces of precooked breakfast sausage, and every morning I can get it all going at once and don’t need to do anything.

For lunch, I eat whatever I want to, and these days enjoy these frozen Indian cuisine meals from a brand called DEEP. I also exercise and then spend several days recovering, and so I can’t have a set lunch because immediately after exercise I need more food than when it’s almost time to exercise again.

Anyway, I believe cooking is good for the soul, and it’s a nice way to wind down during the evening, and good for morale as well. This is why I decided I would try to always make a home cooked dinner every evening if possible.

BUT, I didn’t want a lot of cleanup. My previous house had a very limited means to support the cleanup of lots of pots and pans and eating-ware, and so in my new house I wanted a way to keep the number of things used to cook a single meal to as small a number as possible. If I didn’t do this, then pretty soon the large cleanup would begin to make me resent my dinners subconsciously.

What I WANTED to use was a Japanese wok that my mother bought for me years ago. Woks are amazing, but it has to be shown rather than described, even though I’ll attempt to do so. You see, woks can fry, boil, steam, and often all for the same meal. Say you had already cooked rice and vegetables, and you wanted to cook some greens but also keep the rest of the food piping hot in the wok: What you can do is use your cooking spoon to push the rice and vegetables away from the center of the wok at the bottom, fill the bottom with a little water, and then begin boiling the greens there in the center with the water with all the other food staying out of it. Then you can put the lid on the wok and the steam from the boiling greens will keep all the food hot and from burning.

This shows another advantage of a wok over other ways of cooking a varied meal, which is that all your diverse food items can just all go into the same wok for cooking. Sometimes they can all go in together, but more often there might be something that has to be cooked first because of unalike cooking times.

This idea of the Chinese wok comes sadly from Chinese history and the many famines and food shortages they’ve had to endure throughout the 9000 years they’ve had a continuous culture. I’ll only touch upon the key points about this and why it is important to know when trying to understand the wok.

You see, it is only in very recent history that medical science has possessed a more precise understanding about what sorts of things are in different kinds of food that a human body needs. You have the three macronutrients of Proteins, Fats, and Carbohydrates. You also have all the myriad micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals and other things that the body needs in unequal amounts. There are also things such as probiotics and bioactives, the former being bacteria cultures in our digestive system that don’t cause us harm, but actually consume some of the food we eat and then produce waste which actually contains vitamins that are hard to get from food directly eaten itself. The latter of bioactives are a new concept of things we can eat which don’t necessarily provide any nutritional value themselves, but cause beneficial changes to our physiology, such as a better heartbeat or a reduced inflammation response from your body as two examples.

But, obviously this is all very recent scientific understanding of the food human beings need, and obviously the ancient Chinese didn’t know any of this.

And now to get to the sad part. Due to the lack of an understanding of what was IN different kinds of food, the Chinese had a problem that has still never gone away to this day, which is that within mainland China, everyone has a much higher risk of getting lots of really weird dietary-related illnesses. This is because the population is so large that a diverse diet which provides everyone with a good mix of all the different things their bodies need is more difficult to accomplish, and this is because everyone purchases food continuously and makes much of it unavailable to people shopping later than when the food was in stock.

This means that going back into history, before they had any ways to attempt to ensure that they were eating a balanced diet without having a technical understanding of what they needed to eat, people suffered from all sorts of weird illnesses that only creep up on people suffering from long duration malnutrition, however minor. A lot of these illnesses aren’t even known or even understood to modern science today because a single mysterious illness may only occur within a single person missing a different jumble of vitamins and minerals in their diet than another person suffering from a different illness.

So what they did was come up with the Five Element Theory of Chinese Cuisine. Without going into extreme detail about it, imagine that you lived in China and it was deduced by everyone that the source of all these weird illnesses people were getting was because of an imbalanced diet. The next question everyone would be asking themselves is how they can attempt to balance their diet, even they don’t know what is in different kinds of food, and don’t know what it is their body lacks?

This was more or less solved with a general rule to always eat meals that used different ways to categorize food by a number of different things that could be perceived about it, such as its taste, its color, its shape, and other things more difficult to understand such as each food’s Element, which is where the Five Element Food Theory name for this comes from. Then this was used to influence their purchasing choices in their markets so that they could essentially always randomize their food.

There are obvious caveats, such as that you can’t just eat anything together with anything, and so Chinese cuisine developed around this to ensure that Chinese citizens could vary their diets but the food still tasted good.

All of this is still hugely important in mainland China today, even for tourists and people staying for a long time with a VISA, and people with experience about this will advise you to learn the way the Chinese purchase food and eat, or the longer you stay, the more likely you yourself will start feeling the effects of some creeping dietary illness due to slow and unidentified malnutrition. One woman wrote in a blog I read years ago that while she stayed in China on a VISA, she slowly started suffering from lethargy and eventually didn’t have the energy to do much of anything until she changed how she ate there.

Thus, it is easier to understand the wok when you understand that the Chinese desired a way to cook a lot of different things together which were all somewhat semi-random and varied. Who wants to fool around with three or four pots and go through all that thinking routinely because that afternoon in mainland China you went to the grocery store to see what hadn’t been already bought completely out-of-stock by everyone else?

So, I wanted to use a wok, but even though I wanted to learn to cook Chinese cuisine, there are problems such as the ease of availability of ingredients for it here in the United States. What I decided however is that I could take this Five Element idea of varying my diet, but apply the current understanding of what we need that is inside food to make sure that every meal I cooked in the wok always had the essentials, as well as a random selection of the things we don’t need in such high amounts like vitamins and minerals, and I would, like the Chinese, depend on this sort of diet to allow my body to eventually get supplied with everything it needs over a sufficient enough time of eating this way.

So I got to work composing the Perfect ChatGPT query, and this is it here:

ChatGPT, make a list of fourteen dinners following these instructions: Make sure all ingredients can be commonly found in US grocery stores. Make sure all ingredients are only those ordinary to the American diet, and not any that are new to the American diet, and exclude unusual sources of nutrition from Europe and other parts of the world as well (Farro for example). Include in each meal all three MACROnutrients, and make sure the three MACROnutrients in each meal are good to eat together. Add one additional ingredient which goes well with each meal and is rich in MICROnutrients. Also add another ingredient which goes well with each meal and possesses one or more bioactives. Make sure all fourteen new meals are different from each other. Make sure the ingredients rich in MICROnutrients always provide different MICROnutrients than the other meals. Make sure the ingredients rich in one or more bioactives always provides different bioactives than the other meals. Title each meal by the protein, fat, carbohydrate, micronutrient, and bioactive ingredients you selected for that meal. Also order the fourteen new meals so that those at the beginning of the list have ingredients which have the shortest shelf-life, and those at the end of the list have ingredients which have the longest shelf-life, while ALSO doing your best to make sure that all the meat-sourced proteins don’t repeat until at least the second day after a meal. Lastly, make sure all require only the cookware of a single wok to prepare. After that, generate a second list of all the ingredients mentioned that need to be bought at the grocery store, categorized by their typical aisle or area of an average US grocery store.

The result has been awesome! You need to have some experience in how you cook different things like rice, vegetables, and meat, because it informs your decisions in the evening how you are going to get the meal prepared without following a recipe. It isn’t a big deal, and you just have to look everyday at what meal is next in your two week plan and see if you are boiling pasta or rice, or need to thaw some meat, ext.

I also use Avocado Oil as my cooking oil because I learned it has a high smoke point and thus stays healthy at high frying temperatures unlike Olive Oil. ChatGPT will sometimes say you need this oil or that oil, but I just ignore that and only use Avocado Oil. It will also sometimes count your cooking oil as the fat macronutrient, but that’s actually true, so no big deal. You have to take it easy with this way of cooking your dinners.

As far as my ChatGPT query, it can be tweaked, and you can do other things, such as give it your list of previous meals of the past queries and tell it to only give you NEW meals. The sky is the limit here.