A little less kitchen stress
The high cost of feeding a family—and how I’m reclaiming my time (and my brain).
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The cognitive labor of keeping our families fed is exhausting.
It’s not just the actual time spent cooking. It’s the constant nature of it. As soon as you finish feeding your kids their last meal or snack, it’s time to turn around and do it all again in a few hours’ time. Decide what to feed them. Prep it. Get them to eat it. Clean it up. Then start over.
And while cramming more into every minute of the day is an American ideal, I’m not interested in fitting more into my day. I want to find ways to handle what needs to happen with less friction, so I can free up what’s left of my energy for what actually matters to me.
I can’t imagine I’m the only one feeling this way.
When I looked at survey data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the numbers weren’t surprising but they were validating. The average trip to the grocery store takes 46 minutes. For me, that’s 30 minutes just to get to and from my store. Do that twice a week — hello, poor planning — and you’re at two hours a week just buying food. That’s before you add in making the lists, prepping meals, and cleaning up afterward, which accounts for at least another eight hours a week.
And none of that accounts for the invisible stress of getting our kids to eat, offering healthy choices, and helping them build a good relationship with food.
The cumulative weight of all of that is real. It’s not just you.
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The question I kept coming back to was how to do enough — enough planning, enough intention, enough consistency — without burning myself out. Because the whole reason meal planning had started to feel like a grind was that I’d been trying to keep up with a version of it that was asking too much of me. The recipes I wasn’t getting to. The grocery runs I kept having to redo. The 4 PM dread of figuring out what to make. The Sunday prep sessions I told myself I’d do and then didn’t. All of it had become a weekly reminder of falling short at something I used to like.
So I stopped trying to fix the system and started paying attention to where the weight was actually coming from.
A lot of it was me doing everything from scratch every week. Re-inventing the grocery list. Re-deciding the meal plan. Re-cleaning the same kitchen at the end of the night with no one else helping. Each piece of it individually is small. Stacked together, they’re crushing.
What I’ve been doing instead is pulling the parts of the kitchen rhythm that don’t actually need to change week to week and letting them run on their own. The staples I always buy. The meals that are already working. The shortcut dinners I can lean on when the week goes sideways. When the 80% that stays the same is handled, the 20% that does change becomes manageable. It stops feeling like a full reinvention and starts feeling like one small weekly decision.
It’s not a system. It’s not a plan I’m selling you. It’s just what’s left after I stopped trying to be good at something I was never going to be good at in the form everyone was prescribing.
And I’ll be honest — the biggest shift wasn’t logistical. It was giving myself permission to stop treating the kitchen like a performance. I’m not running a restaurant. I don’t have a food photographer. My kids are going to eat what they eat, and the whole family is going to be fed regardless of whether I cooked something new or heated up leftovers for the third time this week.
The real question isn’t how to do it all better. It’s how to do less of what was never working anyway.
Talk soon,
Erin
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I’m Erin—a former teacher, wife & mom of two in Boulder, Colorado. And this is where I write about what it looks like to stop running my life the way I was told to & start trusting what I know about it instead.
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