Before you think about star ratings or panels or any of the rest of it, there is something simpler that matters more. The order you walk a supermarket in.
The order
- Fruit and vegetables first, which is easy, because it is usually the first thing you walk into.
- Then your protein. The meat and fish counters, the deli, eggs, tinned fish, legumes.
- Then grains and staples. Rolled oats, bread, pasta, rice, tinned tomatoes.
- Then dairy or the alternatives you use. Plain yoghurt, milk, cheese, or a fortified plant milk.
- Then everything else.
That is it. No rules about what you cannot buy, no list of banned foods. Just an order, and the order changes what ends up in the trolley without you having to think about it.
What I do not mean
This kind of advice gets flattened fast, so two clarifications.
I do not mean unpackaged. Plenty of the food doing the actual feeding comes in a packet and always has. Rolled oats, a loaf of bread, tinned chickpeas, a carton of eggs, a tub of plain yoghurt. The packet is not the problem.
And I do not mean unprocessed, because that would rule out a great deal of good food. Bread is processed. Tinned chickpeas have been cooked and salted. Frozen vegetables have been blanched. Processing is a spectrum rather than a switch, and most of what is worth eating sits somewhere along it.
What I am pointing at is the staples. Short ingredient list, you can tell what it was, and most of the decisions about salt, sugar and fat are still yours to make once you get it home.
A note on grains, because this is where it turns preachy
I am not going to tell you it all has to be brown.
Basmati is a very good rice. It sits easier with a lot of people than brown does, and it is what we cook most nights. With pasta I mix a bit of wholemeal through the regular, because a whole plate of wholemeal is heavy and nobody at my table would thank me for it.
The reason to bother at all is fibre, and most of us are short on it. But short of it is not the same as none of it. Half and half moves the needle, and it is the version people keep doing, which counts for more than the version they abandon in a fortnight.
Why the order matters more than the rules
A trolley is finite. So is a week of meals, and so is your appetite.
If the vegetables, the protein and the staples go in first, they take up the room. What comes after is topping up rather than standing in. You have not banned anything, you have just changed what gets there first.
It also means the harder decisions arrive when the trolley is already reasonably full, which tends to make them smaller decisions.
Where the packaged aisles come in
Nearly everyone buys convenience food, myself included, and there is nothing to feel bad about in that.
This is where the label reading matters, and where the star rating and the per 100g column earn their keep. Those tools are for choosing between the things that come after the first few stops, not for deciding what to eat in the first place.
Worth noticing that many of the foods in those early sections carry excellent star ratings anyway. Rolled oats usually score five. The system and the shopping order tend to agree more often than the arguments online would suggest.
The takeaway: Shop in order: produce, protein, grains and staples, dairy, then everything else. Whole food does not mean unpackaged or unprocessed, it means short ingredient lists where the decisions are still yours. Do not let anyone talk you into all brown rice. Fill the trolley with the foundation first and the rest takes care of itself.
The science behind this post:
- National Health and Medical Research Council. Australian Dietary Guidelines. Guidance on the five food groups and recommended proportions. eatforhealth.gov.au
- National Health and Medical Research Council. Nutrient Reference Values for Australia and New Zealand: Dietary Fibre. The Adequate Intake for women aged 19 and over is 25g per day. nrv.gov.au
- Australian Bureau of Statistics. Australian Health Survey: Usual Nutrient Intakes. Reports the proportion of Australian adults not meeting the Adequate Intake for dietary fibre. abs.gov.au