I just want to do one (big) round of grocery shopping a week. I drive 15 min past 3 smaller grocery stores to get to the one with a decent size/selection/prices.

I wouldn’t want to have a large grocery store much closer because of the amount of traffic it generates. As I see it, almost all shopping and commerce is much better in walkable areas, but groceries is one of few things I want a huge store for, and I’m ready to drive some distance to it.

How can you buy groceries once a week and have fresh food? Do you only eat out of boxes of processed food?

Milk lasts a week, meat lasts 2 weeks (and only gets better closer to the end!). The very few things that go bad in less than 7 days (e.g. fresh fish) I just plan so I eat that the first few days after shopping and eat meat later and so on. Bread I typically pick up more times during the week or keep frozen. You can do clever things like buy fruit like bananas with different levels of ripeness so they don’t all go brown at the same time.

A week is a really short time compared to how long most food lasts.

People in the suburbs have to walk a mile just to get out of their neighborhood. And hundreds of millions of Americans live in these suburbs.

I think what the parent is suggesting is that we shouldn't be doomed to continue to make this same mistake.