Resourcefulness

One of the things a restaurateur must do is something they call sourcing. It corresponds roughly with what you and I would call deciding where to go shopping. When a new restaurant opens, they need to find sources for the ingredients needed for their menu, along with other sundries used in their kitchens and restaurants. It’s not unlike moving to a new town, and trying to find a new school, mechanic, doctor, etc. And it involves, predictably, making a myriad of choices.

Much has been written about the psychology of choice. Even though we’re told that choice is good, it can be absolutely paralyzing and does not necessarily lead to happiness. People tend to either overanalyze and be unhappy with their choice, or just make any choice and decide to be happy about it. Interestingly, we can choose behaviors that will lead us to feel better.

The average supermarket contains about 45,000 SKU’s (Stock Keeping Units, part of the data management system supermarket management uses to track inventory and billables). That huge number translates into a lot of choices for a hungry person pushing a cart, or the archetypal harried mother and her melting-down toddler.

Clearly, we can’t consider every item on every trip. Psychologists would call that maximizing: identifying and analyzing every possible to choice to insure the best possible outcome. It’s paralyzing—a person would starve to death in the amount of time it takes to consider and compare 45,000 items.

Our primary coping habit is to develop shopping habits. Food marketers call this brand loyalty, and spend a great deal of money and effort designing catchy slogans and attractive logos to make sure you identify their brand as the one you can trust.

I used to shop at a regionally owned chain carrying national brands (which has since been swallowed by a national conglomerate), but over the years, my shopping habits have changed: I grew tired of wading through countless new labels and resets (that’s when the store rearranges things to get you to notice new products with wider margins). I now do almost all of my shopping at the local, member-owned co-op, where the vast majority of the objectionable ingredients and corporate injustices have already been weeded out.

We’ll call it sourcing for the sustainable home kitchen.