Meal Planning for One Person (Without the Waste)

The common assumption is that cooking for one is wasteful because it's inconvenient — smaller portions are fussy to cook, recipes don't divide evenly. The real driver is structural: research on UK household food waste found that single-occupancy households waste more per person than larger households, and specifically because food goes unused before it spoils, not because of oversized cooking or leftovers. Most grocery packaging — a "family size" bag of salad, a block of cheese meant to last a household of four — is sized for more people than you. Buy it anyway and half goes off before you catch up; skip it and you drift toward shelf-stable convenience food instead.

Buy in the shape you'll actually use — loose or bulk-bin produce over pre-bagged multipacks wherever it's available, so the quantity matches your appetite instead of the package size. Don't treat "recipe for 4" as "eat a quarter of it four nights running" by default — some ingredients (fresh herbs, cream, delicate greens) don't hold up over four days, so plan which night uses the fresh components and which nights reuse a cooked base differently (a roast chicken becomes a chicken salad, then a soup, rather than the same plate three times). Freeze in true single-portion containers immediately after cooking, not one large tub of "leftovers" that gets reheated repeatedly and degrades each time. And keep a mental shortlist of dishes that absorb whatever vegetable is closest to turning — a stir-fry, a frittata, a simple soup base — rather than needing a specific recipe to use it up.

Portion sizes default to your actual household size, not the 2-4 servings most recipe content assumes, so there's no mental math dividing a recipe down. Because every suggestion starts from a photo of what's actually in your fridge, it's already working with the odd half-bag of spinach or the last two eggs, not a recipe you picked first and then had to shop to match. And refining a suggestion — swap the ingredient about to turn, adjust a portion — happens in the same conversation, without starting over.