Nutrition, Satisfaction, Practicality and Dietary Change

It might be helpful to use "design" and "optimizing" approaches to review or improving your diet and food practices. By design, I mean that things have to fit a certain way to meet all of your requirements. You can think of it like a puzzle, but you can also think about it like an engineer might. Choose your own metaphor here.

"Optimizing" can involve individual foods, dishes, meals, etc. Of each of your current meals you can ask the N S P questions. "Trade-ups" are another way of thinking about optimizing.

Appeal of design metaphor: More consistent with an aesthetic approach, beginning with the space and mood of the kitchen.

Appeal of engineering metaphor: diets have parameters and requirements. They are "systems" with supply chains, production and storage process, and quality (satisfaction) requirements.

Practicality can be thought of at several levels from food waste in the kitchen, to the logistics of supplying your diet, to sustainability, etc.

you always know what you need at the store, (easy methods here)
you rarely waste food, (favors batch process)
you don't spend more time preparing food than you can afford, (But how much is that?)
your food is portable when you need it to be, (gear, favors something boxable)
your meals are flexible when they need to be, (can be delayed if you change you mind about eating at home, can be quick)
you have plenty of opportunities to prepare food when you aren't busy, (time shifting meal prep time)
but you never have to do it when you are too busy, (measure reserve or quick dinner options)
you always have something great to eat and many choices about dinner, (assess need for variety)
And, it's all completely affordable. (cost assessment)

Some measurement and goal setting challenges:

How much time should you "afford" for food preparation and enjoying. How often? Slow Food thinking supplies some answers to this.
How much time do you (should you have) have for making meals? When is that time available to you during the week?
What are the main strategies for "time shifting" your meal preparation? for batch preparation?
How many different dinners do you need?
On any given night, how many different dinners could you choose to make quickly?
When you make food from scratch, how often do you make multiple dinners?

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