Two Januarys ago, Food Lion had what I can only describe as an excellent week. Ground beef at $2.49 a pound, pork shoulder at $1.49 a pound, chicken thighs at $1.29 a pound. I saw the sales in the app on Wednesday and I thought about it for a day. Then I went and spent $47 on meat alone.

That sounds like a lot. Here's what I got: four pounds of ground beef, six pounds of pork shoulder, five pounds of thighs. Everything went into the freezer except what I needed for dinner that week. Over the next three weeks I pulled from that freezer every few days and did not buy meat a single time. My meat budget for those three weeks was the forty-seven dollars I'd already spent.

At normal prices, four pounds of ground beef runs about twenty dollars. Six pounds of shoulder at regular price would be around fourteen dollars. Five pounds of thighs, somewhere around twelve to fifteen. Call the normal total forty-seven to fifty dollars — and that's for a single week of shopping, not three. I bought three weeks of protein for one week's worth of money.

This is the whole strategy, and it has almost nothing to do with coupons or apps or tricks. It's just: some things cost less at some times than at other times. If you have room in your freezer and you know you'll eat it, buy more when the price drops.

Meat freezes well. Not everything does. That took me a while to really learn.

The week I learned the hard way

This would have been about four years ago, before Marcus had gotten tall enough to eat everything in the house. Food Lion had a produce sale — this happens less often than meat sales, but it happens. Bell peppers at three for a dollar. Broccoli heads at forty-nine cents each. Grape tomatoes, normally $2.99 a pint, marked to $1.49.

I bought six bell peppers, four heads of broccoli, and three pints of grape tomatoes. I had a plan for some of it. Mostly I bought it because it was cheap and I had the concept that "cheap produce" meant I should buy a lot.

By Thursday, two of the broccoli heads had gone yellow and soft. I cooked one and used it, but I'd let it go a day too long and it was bitter. The tomatoes — I'd used one pint, and the other two sat in the fridge until they started to weep. Four bell peppers ended up in the trash because I'd only used two and the others went limp and then moldy inside before the week was out.

I'd spent about eight dollars on produce that I should have spent maybe three dollars on, and I'd thrown away roughly five dollars worth of food. The sale had not saved me money. It had cost me money and time and space in my refrigerator, and it had made me feel the specific guilt of watching good food go bad because I'd been careless.

Fresh produce is not meat. It does not freeze sitting in its original form. It does not keep through next week. You buy what you'll use before it turns, and not more.

The rules I've worked out

Buy extra when the price drops on things with long shelf lives: meat (goes in the freezer), canned goods (the pantry shelf), dried beans and rice (the pantry shelf), butter (the freezer, where it keeps for months), block cheese (the fridge, where it keeps for weeks). When ground beef drops to $2.49, I buy four pounds instead of one. When canned tomatoes drop to $0.49 from $0.79, I buy ten cans. These are things I will use. They are not going to go bad before I get to them.

Do not buy extra fresh vegetables on sale. This is the lesson from the bell pepper debacle and I have not forgotten it. Fresh vegetables are perishable. The sale price doesn't change their expiration date. If bell peppers are three for a dollar, I might buy three instead of one — that's one week's worth, maybe, if I plan around them. I do not buy six. The savings evaporates the moment even one of them goes soft.

Milk is the same: it expires whether you paid full price or sale price. I buy one gallon at a time regardless of what the sale is.

Bread freezes fine, actually. I will buy an extra loaf and put it in the freezer if the price is right. Defrost a slice or two at a time. This works.

About the apps

Food Lion has a Digital Deals app that runs weekly sales starting on Wednesdays. I open it on Wednesday evening. I look at what's on sale and I cross-reference it mentally with what I already have and what my household actually eats.

Sometimes there's a digital coupon for something useful — a dollar off a specific cut of meat, fifty cents off a specific brand of canned tomatoes. I clip those if they're things I was going to buy anyway. I do not clip them for things I was not already going to buy, regardless of how good the deal looks. This is harder than it sounds. The app is designed to make deals look appealing. I try to stay specific.

There's also a loyalty program that gives slightly better prices at checkout when you've shopped there consistently. I have shopped there consistently for eleven years. I take the prices.

The real thing

The two Januaries I described at the start of this — the good week and the produce waste — were both teaching me the same thing from different directions. The good week taught me that buying ahead on the right things works. The bad week taught me that buying ahead on the wrong things is just waste with extra steps.

You have to know which category something falls into before you buy more of it. Meat: buy ahead. Canned tomatoes: buy ahead. Fresh broccoli: buy what you'll actually use this week, period, full stop.

The freezer is the key infrastructure. I have a chest freezer in the spare room that cost me eighty dollars at a garage sale seven years ago. It has paid for itself many times over. When I find pork shoulder at $1.49 a pound, I don't have to limit myself to what fits in the little freezer above the refrigerator. I buy what makes sense and it goes downstairs.

Marcus has learned to check the chest freezer before he tells me we're out of something. Usually we're not out of it. It's just downstairs.