The Safe Foods Fridge List
Free · print at home
The food you can always get down when nothing else works
One page for the fridge door. Write your safe foods on a good day, so there is nothing to decide on a bad one.
You know the six o’clock version of it. You open the fridge, look at a shelf with food on it, shut it again and walk away. Then it’s nine, and it’s a takeaway or it’s nothing.
That isn’t fussiness and it isn’t laziness. Deciding what to eat is a job — noticing you’re hungry, choosing, checking you’ve got it, starting, finishing — and by the evening you have run out of the thing you do all of that with. A safe food breaks the loop, because the deciding already happened weeks ago.
What you get
A single A4 page, designed to be printed at home and stuck on the fridge.
- Ten ruled lines for your own list, with a column to mark the ones with protein in — those are the ones that keep you going longer than toast alone.
- The four tests a safe food has to pass, across the top, so you can check as you write.
- Eight that come up most, for the days you are asked what you like and your mind goes blank.
- The five-step method, and the one warning nobody gives you about safe foods.
The four tests
- It tastes the same every time. This is why packaged food is so often a safe food. The same brand of fish fingers never surprises you.
- It takes under ten minutes, or no time at all.
- There are no decisions in it. No working out what goes with it, no choosing a sauce.
- It keeps. If it goes off in two days it will not be there on the day you need it.
None of them will win an award. That is not the point. The point is that you eat.
Get the list
No form, no waiting. It opens straight away and prints on one sheet of A4.
One A4 page · PDF · free · prints at home
If you want the bigger one as well — forty-two small things that lift you, four seasons, grown-ups and children — put your email in and we’ll send the Dopamine Menus too.
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Who made it
We’re an ADHD family, and decision fatigue is loudest in our kitchen. My husband spent 25 years as a chef and would still open the fridge at six o’clock and freeze. We wrote this down because we needed it, which is the only reason any of it works.
If your list is very short and keeps shrinking, or you are losing weight without meaning to, that is worth a word with your GP rather than a printable.