Not long ago, published a wildly entertaining (and mildly classist) column called The Receipt. Each week, an orchestra conductor or a pastor or a person in some other occupation that made way more money than you’d think would share receipts for every single thing they ate, often at restaurants. The comments were gold, as judgey and sarcastic as Internet people can be.

As much as it made me chuckle to read about a pilot in San Francisco’s $555 pork chop, what I really want to know is what regular people spend at the grocery store. A The Receipt for normal people at Safeway. Like, is my $130 a week average for my family of four admirable or alarming? Am I slowly killing my children by not buying organic and farm-raised everything? Am I too obsessed with eliminating food waste, or not obsessed enough?

If you share my “Am I Normal?” neurosis, let me offer you a glimpse into my spending habits, culinary aspirations and unresolved psychological issues via Exhibit A: my $144.30 King Soopers receipt. Please feel free to judge me. I would.

Here are my four major conclusions:

1. I am very cheap.
2. I live in low-grade fear that non-organic cuties and spinach will someday give my children a terrible disease, but not enough to spend an extra $1.50.
3. It¶¶Ňőap possible that I buy way more bananas than the average person.
4. And I should probably seek therapy for my deeply ingrained scarcity mindset. (But then again, it¶¶Ňőap kind of difficult to rationalize $200-an-hour therapy when you have, you know, a scarcity mindset.)

Total spent: $144.30*

*Note that we have no food allergies or dietary issues of any kind, unless you count my husband’s distaste for chicken and, well, pretty much any non-bacon or steak meat and my 12-year-old son’s 10,000-calories-a-day intake as issues.

Most expensive item: a skirt steak for $17.28, the smallest one they had, because a $20 steak feels downright Elon-esque.

Least expensive item: a lime for 50 cents that I’m pretty sure I ended up throwing away, but my husband always thinks he needs fresh limes and then does not do anything with them. This makes me crazy, but he insists and so I choose my battles.

Percentage of Kroger brand items: 53. This actually seems deceptively low, because it¶¶Ňőap not like I bought the fancy steak; I just don’t know the brand. I also have no brand loyalty whatsoever and would have happily eschewed the $3.79 Keebler chocolate pie crust (I really like cheesecake) had Kroger given me the opportunity to. The Barilla rigatoni was on sale, making it the same price ($1.99) as the Kroger brand — score!

Organic? I bought the Simple Truth brown eggs for $2.99; does that count? Also, rainbow carrots for $2.49.

Things I maybe should have bought organic, but did not: An avocado for $1; Sun Pacific cuties for $4.49; Kroger tender spinach for $2.19; tomatoes for $1.40; a cucumber for 79 cents; and Italian parsley for $1.29.

Price difference had I purchased said organic items: Maybe $4? I should really look into this, but my scarcity brain tells me that $4 is reckless spending.

Most purchased item: Two cream cheeses at $1.79 each (remember that I really like cheesecake?); two packages of bacon at $3.99 each (I recently discovered the greatness of BLTs at age 44); two packs of Reese’s peanut butter cups for $2.49 each (for the kids!); and 5½ pounds of bananas for $3.07 (is that a lot of bananas? I don’t even know!).

Impulse buys: This might be the most embarrassing category of all. Nothing. I am a very disciplined person who sticks to the list, and even the treats for the kids were premeditated, so I did not indulge in anything extra this week.

Worth it: The Kroger brand sliced Muenster for $2.49 seems like a steal, as does its gallon of milk for $1.99. (Scarcity mind loves a good three-day sale!)

Not worth it: The $3.67 Taylor Farms salad kit that I threw out a week and a half later because who ever wants to eat salad? Not me! Plus, the Private Selection honey ham for $6.99 that no one eats in spite of me yelling, “Make a sandwich!” whenever the kids complain that there’s no food in the house. And the $1.79 bundle of mustard greens that my husband thought was lettuce.

Total number of items: 45

Dinners made with all this food: Skirt steak with chimichurri and roasted carrots; Dijon sausage rigatoni; rice bowls with cucumber salad and gochujang shrimp; bacon, spinach and shallot frittata; and pizza.

Cost per family dinner: $12.50, but with the huge caveat that we have a fully stocked kitchen so many of the ingredients — especially things like oil, spices, condiments, frozen items and canned goods — didn’t need to be purchased this week. Had I bought everything new, I surely would have had an aneurysm at checkout.

So there you go. Judge me and my King Soopers spending habits. I’ll just be over here calculating the unit price of therapy.

GLP-1s, drugs designed to regulate blood sugar, weren’t supposed to disrupt how we eat. They were built for metabolic control, not cultural upheaval, but it¶¶Ňőap their effect on appetite that¶¶Ňőap been the plot twist.

Now, if you want to see how drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro have reshaped how we eat, don’t look to a scale or a lab report. Look at a restaurant menu.

It was actually back in 2005 that the first GLP-1 drug was approved to treat Type 2 diabetes, but unless you were directly affected, you probably didn’t hear about these sorts of drugs until the more potent Ozempic entered our cultural lexicon. Over the past couple of years, as millions of Americans began taking these GLP-1s — and as appetites have shrunk — restaurants started to notice.

Some of the changes? Downsized portions, cocktails losing their alcohol and protein pushing its way into everything from our morning coffee to ice cream cones. What began as a medical intervention is now rewriting the menu.

I’ll admit, I thought in response to Ozempic was just clickbait. Mostly, it was my own ignorance. I thought of the drugs as something only celebrities and rich people were taking for vanity, and I didn’t understand how they actually work.

The reality is that 18% of Americans have taken a GLP-1 drug for one reason or another, and those numbers are expected to grow substantially this year as new pills hit the market and as prices come down. Essentially, these drugs mimic a naturally occurring hormone that regulates blood sugar, slows digestion and signals fullness to the brain, erasing hunger long before that “personal” pizza is finished.

The result is not just weight loss, but also a reset of appetite itself. GLP-1 medications normalize smaller appetites — and restaurants are starting to respond.

“Before, if you didn’t have these gargantuan portions [on your menu], you were frowned upon,” said Brent Berkowitz, COO of Denver-based Olive & Finch restaurants. “The trend is flipping around. Now it¶¶Ňőap about quality and flavor over quantity.”

At Olive & Finch, that looks like adding smaller, protein-dense plates to the menu and shedding some of those empty calories. Protein is a key part to all of this, the VIP on the plate to make sure weight comes off without taking all your muscles with it.

“It¶¶Ňőap monstrous, the emphasis on protein,” Berkowitz said. “I’ve been on GLPs. You don’t feel like eating. Eating becomes a chore, not something you enjoy. You might have had 30 bites before, now you have 13 bites. So it¶¶Ňőap got to entice you.”

Nationally, the GLP-1 era has made its way to the corporate test kitchen, with many chains getting in on the small-portion, high-protein action. Olive Garden added a “lighter portion” section to its menu in December 2025. Subway introduced $3.99 Protein Pockets in January, and Shake Shack is channeling the Atkins days with bun-less burgers on its “Good Fit” menu.

While most restaurants have been discreet about naming GLP-1s directly, Smoothie King wasn’t shy about calling its menu what it is. They created a dedicated GLP-1 Support Menu back in 2024, full of high-protein, no-added-sugar smoothies designed specifically for Ozempic users.

Carrie Baird, partner and culinary director of Culinary Creative Group, which runs restaurants like Tap & Burger, Mister Oso, Bar Dough and Fox and the Hen, gave a playful nod to the drugs on her most recent menu at Tap & Burger. The smaller-portion, higher-protein burgers are under a new section called Green Lean Protein. (GLP – get it?)

“I think the demand is there,” Baird said. “For me, writing menus, I want to make sure I’m making these things available to people who want to eat like that. I want to give them the options.”

Her next goal is to create sugar-free mocktails for her restaurants, as GLP-1s can make alcohol less appealing. So while the sober movement had already been picking up steam over the past decade, these meds might just give it a little extra fizz going forward.

Even after learning more about these drugs, their history and their implications, I’ll admit that my ignorance and stereotyping about who, exactly, is taking them persisted. (I blame ‘The Real Housewives.’) I asked Berkowitz — who has Olive & Finch locations in Cherry Creek, Uptown, Union Station and the Denver Performing Arts Complex, as well as Little Finch on 16th Street — if geography played a role in demand. Would Cherry Creekers, I hypothesized, be more likely to need an Ozempic-friendly menu because of their reputation for being, well, maybe a little more Housewife-y?

Berkowitz emphasized that demand for this type of eating is showing up at all of their locations, but it is strongest at the Cherry Creek and Arts Complex restaurants. Still, even in neighborhoods where image isn’t everything, the appetite shift is real.

These drugs may not have been designed to change how we eat, but here we are. Protein added to anything and everything, smoothies designed to play nice with your prescriptions and restaurants measuring portions by appetite, not tradition. Maybe GLP-1s have done what no menu ever could: They’re convincing insatiable Americans that less is more.

Allyson Reedy is a Denver-area freelance writer, cookbook author and novelist. She is also a former Denver Post food writer. 

My house used to have Thai Tuesday.

We’d order takeout from our favorite local spot, happily trading time at the stove and a sink full of dishes for curries and noodles that arrived hot and delicious. At a little more than $10 a plate, it felt like a splurge — but a manageable one. An easy-to-rationalize indulgence on a random weeknight when everyone was tired and hungry and no one wanted to talk about quinoa.

But Thai Tuesday has gone the way of free bread at restaurants and anyone but me changing the rolls of toilet paper at my house. Not because we stopped loving Thai food, but because dinner now comes with a side of financial anxiety. As someone who loves to eat and try new restaurants, but who also loves paying her (thankfully-locked-in-at-2.5%) mortgage on time, I keep coming back to that age-old question, but for different reasons these days: What¶¶Ňőap for dinner?

Ordering takeout used to feel like opting out of effort. Lately, it feels like opting into credit card debt. I do the quiet mental math while waiting in drive-thru lines: $13 meals times four people adds up to nearly $60 for my family’s beloved Good Times burgers and fries.

And that’s just for fast food. Somewhere along the way, the dinner middle ground disappeared. Picking up to-go food from the local Chinese spot or even Chipotle was once the compromise between cooking at home and sitting down at a restaurant. It cost a little more than a home-cooked meal, but not so much that it felt out of reach. But now it¶¶Ňőap adding up.

I’ve had this conversation with pretty much everyone I know lately. A friend tells me her Chick-fil-A lunch ran $16. Someone else grabbed drinks and appetizers at The Cherry Cricket and left $60 lighter. Scroll Denver Food Reddit for five minutes and you’ll find the requisite “Can you believe this sandwich cost $20?” thread.

Dinner choices, like so many things right now, feel increasingly stratified. There’s the cheapish and labor-intensive cooking at home and stretching leftovers, or the takeout/eating out experience that¶¶Ňőap increasingly expensive. What¶¶Ňőap missing is that once-reliable in-between option that made weeknights easier without blowing the budget. Middle-ground food, like the middle class itself, feels like it¶¶Ňőap slipping away.

Takeout used to be the pressure valve, the thing that kept us from burning out after returning from work, out of energy and willpower. Too tired to cook? Too broke for a sit-down restaurant? No problem, have some takeout tacos. But lately, even fast-casual feels like a decision you have to justify.

How did that happen? Not because restaurants suddenly got greedy, or because we all collectively broke Apple Wallet when money stopped feeling real. It¶¶Ňőap not like restaurant owners banded together at their Annual Restaurant Owner Meeting and decided to spike prices for the heck of it. I don’t see the owner of my local pizzeria driving around town in a Ferrari.

If anything, it was inevitable. Restaurants are dealing with the same things the rest of us are — runaway rents, soaring food costs and, at least in Denver, a tipped minimum wage that¶¶Ňőap nearly $5 higher per hour than that in notoriously expensive New York City. And all of this is happening in an industry that¶¶Ňőap always operated on famously thin margins.

Unsurprisingly, a 2025 Expert Market Food & Beverage Industry Report, which surveyed restaurant professionals, found that 85 percent believe labor issues affect their business, with more than half pointing to wages and benefits as the single biggest threat to profitability. To cope, nearly two-thirds have raised prices. Almost one in five have raised them significantly.

So, yeah, this is why the math stops working at mealtime. A recent Newsweek article called the food and beverage sector “the canary in the coal mine,” one of the first sectors where economic anxiety shows up when people start tightening their belts. Which means that that $20 pad thai could be just the beginning.

The real loss isn’t any one dish or restaurant, but the ease of it all. Thai Tuesday didn’t disappear at my house because it stopped being good; it disappeared because it stopped being reasonable. The middle ground it occupied ghosted us, along with the idea that a weeknight meal could be both convenient and affordable.

Tonight, “What¶¶Ňőap for dinner?” is about more than just food. It¶¶Ňőap about time, money, burnout and what we’re willing to give up. Cooking means more work. Eating out means more money. And somewhere between the fridge and the menu board, we’re realizing, often with a side of sticker shock, that the way we eat now says as much about the economy as it does about our appetites.

Allyson Reedy is a Denver-area freelance writer, cookbook author and novelist. She is also a former Denver Post food writer. 

I’ve been a food journalist for almost 20 years, writing about fanciful luxuries like caviar-topped tater tots, Iberico ham that costs more than my first car and sorbets made of both arugula and foraged pine needles. Somehow, though, in the thousands of articles I’ve penned, I have never written a word — nor, now that I think about it, read a word — about microwave food.

This is strange, because for the first 17 years of my life, frozen TV dinners made up the vast majority of what I ate. I was born to a single, teenage mom, who didn’t have the time to spend hours roasting a chicken, the money to buy the good cheese or the energy to chop and stir in accordance to handed-down recipes. What she had was a buck or two a meal and a microwave, which meant I grew up craving that soggy Kid Cuisine fried chicken and Michelina’s lasagna that stained the tray with its caramelized tomato sauce.

Surely there are others like me, those with exhausted parents and budgets to keep. Without backyard gardens or Le Creuset Dutch ovens or maybe even, like at the beginning of my own life, without full-on kitchens. Parents with just a frosty, brittle-shelved freezer, a plugged-in microwave and the love for a child that could be shown in ways other than baking bread from scratch.

It could be a class thing or an ethnicity thing or maybe a geographic thing, I don’t really know. Maybe we want to keep quiet about our frozen Michelina’s and marrow-deep love for those Kid Cuisine brownies because it conveys something shameful, something less-than. It paints our own parents in a negative light because no, not everything was “made with love.” It reveals that we did not have the money to eat sushi, takeout or even Taco Bell unless it was a special occasion.

I’ve read a lot about how other kids’ meals were served with ritual and legacy, the stories of those simmering Sunday sauces and family recipes passed down through generations every nostalgic word making my nuked dinners feel more and more like embarrassing pragmatism. Because what I ate was never about mastery or tradition; it was about filling a stomach with whatever was affordable and fast. I can’t possibly be alone in that experience.

Food journalism, with its endless praise of artisanal everything and hand-churned truffle butters, makes this gap feel absurd. Even moreso now that grocery bills rival flat-screen TVs and monthly health insurance premiums cost what a mortgage once did. Entire pages, entire magazines, are devoted to food that most people will never taste, let alone prepare at home. Meanwhile, the meals that sustained me and countless others — the Banquets, the Healthy Choices, the hum of a microwave as it counted down — exist invisibly uncelebrated.

And maybe that¶¶Ňőap the point. These meals don’t come with Instagram-ready aesthetics or aspirational narratives. They come with necessity, memory and, if you pay attention, in the knowledge that someone cared enough to make sure you ate.

Maybe my experience eating the same roster of fried chicken or lasagna TV dinners — I had a fleeting beef stroganoff phase, but that gave way to mac and cheese pretty quickly — made me more curious about food as an adult and primed me for my work in restaurant journalism. There was so much I didn’t eat as a kid, so many flavors, cuisines and cooking techniques that felt completely out of reach. As an adult, the food world suddenly seemed enormous, full of possibilities, and I wanted to know it all. That curiosity became the foundation for my career, and I devoted myself to exploring every corner of it, from hole-in-the-wall diners to fine dining, from my first taste of pho to $200 tasting menus, forgetting, I now realize, my own food roots.

I’m a mother myself, and I carry a weird sense of pride that my kids don’t eat those microwave meals, probably don’t even know what they are. And why is that? Do I think myself a better mother for throwing together a stir-fry with closeout sale Kroger veggies? For boiling water for pasta and opening a jar of Rao’s? (But only when my own mother, the one who pressed the glowing, beeping buttons that made my dinners before I could reach them, brings me some from a Costco sale.)

I decided that my kids needed a taste of what I grew up with. That they needed the experience of peeling back the film on a partitioned, nuked dinner. So I wandered the frozen aisle, hunting for microwavable bridges between my childhood and theirs.

As it turns out, Kid Cuisines have evolved over the past 35 years. My bone-in chicken legs have given way to dinosaur-shaped nuggets, the corn advancing to crinkle cut fries and the brownie being replaced by far inferior white chocolate-coated pretzels to dip in lame chocolate sauce. The kids were not impressed.

But food doesn’t have to be perfect to matter. Or to be worthy of words in magazines, newspapers and blogs. Love, like food, comes in many forms, and sometimes it arrives in plastic trays, heated until it steams under microwaved film.

Allyson Reedy is a Denver-area freelance writer and author, and a former Denver Post food writer.