No-Restaurant-November: an urbanite's quest to survive at the supermarket

You have to understand something about me:  I'm an annoying urbanite whose idea of growing-your-own-food usually involves grow-lights, basements, and some form of hip-sounding tea.  This isn't entirely the fault of liberal media and ivory-tower introspection: vegetables are just amazingly expensive here.  Nothing grows in Boston, other than systemic resentment of the government and Red Socks fans.  Avocados are $2 each.  Tomatoes require monthly payments.  And so the idea of needing food, and then cooking it, doesn't have as strong as an influence here as other regions of the country.

Or I'm just really lazy.

Well, it's time for that to end the vicious cycle of food outsourcing.  Today, I declare No-Restaurant-November!  A heroic quest for this city folk to prove it is possible for him to survive on just food that he made for himself for a month.  We will be reaching back in time all the way back to 1995, before the dot-com-boom made sushi into a something you put into your baby's pacifier.  We will be making food the traditional way humanity has done it for thousands of years... Not by webbing Foodler, but by opening pre-packaged freeze-dried protein, cooking it, and freezing it again.

Today is Day 1 of No-Restaurant-November, and it's time to buy some pre-processed food-like substances.  It may seem completely normal to you, but the local supermarket is a baffling array of choices, all of which are bad.  The canned vegetables aisle, for example, has a thousand different types of beets, baby carrots, canned tomatoes, and other things no sane human would want, all packaged in enough salt to kill a water buffalo.  There is an aisle devoted to dehydrated potato powders of various types, which is interesting considering there is also an aisle of dehydrated potato slices and (for the truly adventuresome) an aisle of just potatoes.  Why you'd need all three, and why they're not next to each other, is beyond me.  The dairy section isn't anywhere near the beef section, nor are chickens close to eggs.  And the frozen food is separated from the regular food by haircare and cat litter.  Clearly, there is some sort of advanced commentary upon society going on here.  Hopefully, with a little more study I can understand the machinations of this fascinating giant corporate behemoth.