The Pareto Diet

The Pareto Principle (or the 80 / 20 rule) is a well known phenomenon in several fields. The general idea is that 80% of effects often result from 20% of causes. Put differently, often one can get 80% of the way to solving a problem by putting in only 20% of the effort that would be required to entirely fix the problem. The Pareto principle seems arbitrary and unbelievable, but it really represents a statistical power-law relationship between effort and result. The power law shows up everywhere, from income distribution to CPU cache misses, and helps explain why "good enough" is so much faster than "perfect".

Sourcing and cooking tasty, nutritious meals takes quite a bit of time. The following is my system to Pareto my diet and only put in 20% of the effort to get 80% of a good meal.

Goals

The Pareto diet is really more of a system than a traditional diet. There aren't restrictions or calorie limits. The system:

1. Preserves the following baseline properties of a meal:
1. Taste
2. Freshness
2. Optimizes the following parameters:
1. Micronutrients / 1k calories
2. Protein / 1k calories
3. Labor hours / 1k calories
1. Including both planning and actual cooking
4. Costs / 1k calories
5. Storage and logistical costs
1. Frequency of trips to a grocery store
2. Possibility of ingredients spoiling
3. Storage space consumed
3. And provides the following additional metrics:
1. Glycemic index values

The system achieves this in a novel way. Rather than providing list of recipes and daily targets / schedules the Pareto diet submits to the reader a fundamentally different way to approach cooking.

Method

The Pareto approach to cooking is all about assembly. Define a few basic components of a meal and then mix them effectively at random. Each meal is a relatively unique, creative product made from ingredients which are always available and already prepped. This is only possible by embracing the Pareto principle. A well-designed meal with carefully chosen complimentary ingredients is impossible to beat. However, I've found one can get about 80% of the way without much effort or planning.

The trick is to define and develop a repertoire of a few basic ingredient groups: prepped meat, fresh vegetables, a power base, and spice / sauce mixtures. As long as the ingredients themselves are high quality and a modicum of intelligence is used when pairing them, combinations of these four categories will always taste excellent.

Armed with this basic method it becomes far easier to optimize meals every day for the goals outlined above. Perhaps best of all, the boring, tedious parts of cooking are relegated to habit or eliminated while the enjoyable, creative moments remain the prerogative of the human mind.

An Example

You've finished a day of work and it's time to cook dinner. It's not a grocery day so you know you don't need to check your pantry or run by the store. Browsing your selection of fresh vegetables, you find a perfectly ripe tomato. You pair that with fresh shoshito peppers for some kick and dice both into a skillet over some oil. It being dinner, you select a low-GI power base: delicious black beans. Lastly, you throw some pre-rolled frozen meatballs into the oven. Garlic powder, mustard powder, and salt complete the flavor with a bit of flower to thicken up the juices of the vegetables into a sauce.

Dinner is finished. It's fresh! It has not spent 24 hours in a refrigerator and does not suffer from uneven heating in a microwave. It took maybe 30 minutes of cooking time start to finish and only 15 minutes of actual work (the other 15 minutes spent waiting). Without spending time tracking every ingredient you know your macro consumption within ±20% accuracy.

Ingredient Groups

The key to the Pareto diet is in the selection and availability of proper ingredient groups.

The Power Base 🗲

The power base provides the key source of both calories and protein in the meal. Meat will supplement a meal's protein, but generally the power base can be scaled without unhealthy effects (unlike red meat, for example) if more energy is needed.

A good power base will have a very long shelf life, cost very little, and take minimal time to prepare. The following table lists my collection of good power bases.

For any power base with a shelf life longer than a month, it's best to keep a decent surplus. Proper grocery store runs will be infrequent and all long shelf life ingredients should be replenished before they run out; perhaps at the 25% remaining point.

Meat

I personally find that the flavors meat provides to a meal cannot really be replicated any other way. Meat is also generally easy to prepare and provides taste without tremendous effort. However, the human body isn't really meant to eat tremendous amounts of meat every day. In the Pareto system, the role of meat is to provide flavor, a bit of bonus protein, and certain beneficial forms of fat. However, the heavy lifting for protein is done by the power base category and any recipe that is scaled up for bulking should be scaled along that axis rather than this one.

Practically speaking, meat can represent a logistical nightmare. Fresh meat goes bad quickly and most meat is expensive per calorie, especially at smaller volumes. The table below lists some good options and recipes for meat. Note the symbol μ μ is the Greek lowercase mu character. - it stands for a "meal unit".

Except for canned fish, most meats will need to be frozen to have any sort of useful shelf life. I will continue to seek and add good prep-and-freeze recipes to the above table.

Fresh Vegetables

Much of the nutrition of a Pareto meal will come from the vegetables chosen. So does much of the flavor. Here more than anywhere else is quality fundamental to success. Unfortunately, most vegetables in modern grocery stores are poor simulacrums of the real thing. The vegetable available at Kroger has been bred and grown with two goals in mind: visual appearance and year-round availability. Modern commercial cultivars of vegetables are larger, more colorful, and blemish free than rustic alternatives. However, the nutritional values of such vegetables tends to be the same as smaller, traditional variants. This means that commercial cultivars have less nutritional value per unit weight or volume as the same nutrients are distributed over more space. When it comes to vegetables, flavor mostly stems from the available nutrients, so commercial vegetables just aren't very tasty.

Quality vegetables come from farmer's markets. Some grocery stores will stock local farm vegetables in season but it's some trouble to determine which ones do and don't at any given time for an area. If market vegetables are not available (e.g. in winter), canned vegetables can provide a decent substitute if high quality brands are used. Always prioritize vegetables that are currently in season.

Keep a stock of vegetables on hand and go through them regularly.

Seasonal produce chart for the southern US (varies by region).

Sauces and Spices

Additives like spices and sauces have long shelf lives and can be added without much concern about any factor aside from taste. I currently make specific choices every meal, but over time I hope to set down a few classic mixtures here.

In Practice

The following baseline practices will ensure that the Pareto method can be performed and optimized well:

1. Plan to go to the grocery store once a week, preferably on the same day. Check all generally-stocked consumables (power bases, spices, canned meats, etc.) and plan to replenish those running too low. Plan out meat needs and purchase accordingly.
2. Plan to visit a farmer's market as frequently as possible. Purchase vegetables there.
3. Do any bulk-prep (like making meatballs) in advance rather than at the last minute. Doing all bulk prep at once is more efficient.
4. Keep canned meat (e.g. tuna) as a backup in case fresh meat runs out. Always prioritize fresh, non-frozen meat so that it never goes bad.
5. Keep at least three different power bases available at any given time.