iPermie!

That many if not most people...who want fresh leafy greens in January buy them at the supermarket after they've been bleached and plastic-bag shipped from California or beyond is not a tribute to modern technology; it's an unprecedented abdication of personal responsibility and a ubiquitous benchmark of abnormality. — Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World

Menu planning is more than a necessary household “chore.” It is an opportunity to develop your household’s food systems to be more sustainable, resilient, and economical.

Menus are an essential design element of your permacultured kitchen.

Why? Good food doesn’t happen by accident. A menu plan can:

Increase the nutritional value of your meals, as you incorporate healthy principles of eating into your cooking.
Help you become more sustainable — as you have the opportunity to incorporate more local and organic foods into your diet.
Save time — consider how often people go to the store to get “just one thing” for dinner.
Save money — by planning, careful shopping, and creative use of leftovers.

For college students, studying your school cafeteria menus provides opportunities to educate your campus food service people about whatever deficiencies or problems you find in their food service menus. Making menus is an important lifestyle skill for everyone.

Start small. If you aren’t in the habit of doing menu planning, you don’t have to plan a month of menus first time. Start planning maybe three days at a time and work your way up to your typical food shopping schedule. Your menu cycle will be closely linked with your income and shopping cycles.

Make a list. Make a list of the breakfast, lunch, and supper foods that your family likes to eat. Talk it over with your household. Make a second list of any new foods you want to try in the near future. Make a third list of home production foods you have available, and foods available from your local/regional foodshed.

Do a “first cut.” Use your lists to fill in the information for each day. For example, your list may include the following breakfasts: (1) biscuits and gravy, (2) pancakes, (3) omelets, (4) cereal, (5) breakfast casserole. You can get whole what flour, sausage, eggs, and granola from your regional food shed, so these meals will have good local content. That’s a stacked function and that’s good. Get the household involved if more than one person will eat from this menu.

Do a similar process for lunch and dinner.

Voila! You’ve just planned a week of meals. For the next few days, you don’t have to wonder “what's for dinner?”

Check nutrition. Make sure your menus are nutritionally complete. If your household follows a particular “philosophy of food nutrition,” plan your meals according to those principles. Whatever your philosophy of nutrition is, make sure your menu supports it. If you don’t have a philosophy of nutrition, you should probably get one. There are readings later in this section which can help with that.

Make the menu more sustainable. Incorporate sustainable principles and strategies in your menu preparation:

Eat with the season. If you are able to grow or source some local foods, start your planning with those foods. (Students: work with your campus food service on this issue.)

Be temperate in your choice of foods. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. (This is particularly important for students calling for beneficial changes in their campus food services.)

Stack functions. Cook once, eat three or four times. Plan to use leftovers in meals later in the day or week.

Shopping list. Write down the ingredients you will need and how much you will need. For example, suppose you plan to eat biscuits and gravy six times during the month, and you feed three people. Add it up:

1/2 cup flour times 3 people = 1-1/2 C flour times 6 breakfasts = 9 C flour

1/2 cup milk times 3 people = 1-1/2 C milk times 6 breakfasts = 9 C milk

Sausage = 1/8 lb. sausage times 6 breakfasts = 3/4 lb. sausage.

Source the ingredients. This involves determining what you already have on hand, what you need to buy, and where you can buy it (supermarket, food coop, farmers market, etc.)

I like to think of a “food source pyramid”.

Most of the food comes from your household’s production or from local farmers (via a food coop, farmers market, CSA, etc.). This is the base.

Next comes a layer of foods bought from the regional food shed, including store brands from regional cooperatives owned by local grocery stores.

At the top, the smallest portion of the pyramid is for those foods you get from worldwide sources (citrus, chocolate, coffee, tea, bananas, etc.)

Save the menus and source lists. Save your menus, ingredient and source lists, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every week. As you accumulate menus, you reduce your planning time. Eventually, this task becomes incorporated into your regular your routine and the detailed record keeping becomes less necessary. In the meantime, adequate records can help you learn good menu planning skills.

Eat, drink, and be happy! Prepare and serve your meals to your household! As we say in Oklahoma. . . Y’all bon appétit, you hear?