GROCERY SHOPPING SECRETS

Kates, who has worked in food manufacturing and grocery store management, presents a comprehensive guide to grocery shopping with advice on selecting, storing, and serving food.

Inspired by her grocer father, the author says that she’s always believed that quality ingredients “can be more important than the recipe.” Her guide begins with two dozen steps that readers can take to reduce their food budgets and then moves on to explain different types of food labels most often seen in stores. Some defined terms (such as “calories”) will be obvious to most readers, but other categories are more nuanced, such as the official differences between “fat free,” “low fat,” “reduced fat,” and “light.” The bulk of the book is dedicated to the proper way to select and store various foodstuffs. Kates covers 13 food groups, from fruit and vegetables to cheese and meats. Specific foods merit short blurbs, as well as tips on proper methods for choosing and storing them. The deli chapter contains directions on making professional looking fruit and vegetable trays and includes charts on yields (for example, one three- to four-pound pineapple yields 40 bite-sized chunks, while one two-pound honeydew melon yields 36).Kates covers the meanings of special diet labels such as “Vegan” or “Certified Keto” and meat labels, such as “pasture raised” and “animal welfare certified.” She offers recommendations on how to select, freeze, thaw, and marinate various meats; for example, she warns not to “purchase frozen shrimp that have dry spots on their shells. This is a sign of freezer burn. Except for the black tiger variety of shrimp, black spots on shells are an indication of spoilage.”

The guide’s folksy, old-fashioned tone may remind readers of a friendly relative giving practical advice. Some of it can feel a bit out of touch, such as advice to “pay attention to prices” and “make a shopping list of what is needed” to save money at the store. Other tips are needlessly nitpicky, such as “Mark the date of freezing on all packages with a black marker.” (Why not red or blue?) Overall, though, Kates has created a grocery guide of impressive proportions, in which seemingly any question a shopper may have seems to have been answered somewhere in its pages. Much of her advice includes issues that many people have surely wondered about at some point or another, such as the best way to freeze food and whether it’s safe to use something beyond its sell-by date; regarding the latter, Kates goes a step further and lists exactly how long after the sell-by dates different items may be used: Eggs are good for three to five weeks after the date; ground beef and poultry are good one to two days beyond it. The level of detail in each category is surprising in its thoroughness. All these features make it a useful starter guide for college students, newlyweds, or anyone else braving the world of grocery shopping and cooking on their own for the first time.

Some tips in this book feel like common sense, but many others will be helpful to those looking to make the most of their grocery budget.