30 plants a week

Counting 30 plants a week,
without a spreadsheet

The idea comes out of gut microbiome research and got popular through ZOE: aim for thirty different plant foods across a week. Vegetables, fruit, grains, nuts, seeds, herbs, spices — variety rather than volume. Counting them by hand lasts about four days.

Where the count comes from

Every recipe in your box carries its plant list, so the counting happens as a side effect of planning. Fill in the week and you can already see what it adds up to; log what you ate and you get the real number next to it. They're rarely the same, which is the interesting part.

Set the number yourself

Thirty is a slogan, and a good one, but it's somebody else's target. The goal is a field you edit — start at twenty if that's where you are. The same page holds targets for fermented foods, peanut exposures, distinct dishes, and the share of the week that came out of a packet.

The peanut one exists for a specific reason: with a young child, the current advice is regular early exposure, and "did that actually happen this week" turns out to be surprisingly hard to remember. A number on a page answers it.

What it can't see

Only tagged food counts. A dinner typed in as "Thai" contributes nothing until someone says what was in it. You can fill the tags in yourself, or hand the job to Claude, which is genuinely good at looking at a week of meals and working out which plants were in them.

mealgrep counts things. It isn't nutrition advice and it doesn't pretend to be.