Groceries, in particular, are more of an effect than a cause. Lots of people live without cars in New York City, or London, or Paris, or Toronto, or Tokyo, and they manage to eat. The reason you need to buy 7 days worth of food for two people all at once is because you live in a field far away from everything. “Getting Groceries” becomes a special trip, because, while driving, leaving the highway, stopping and parking are inconvenient.

As a pedestrian in a city, I was going to walk past 5 food stores on my way between work and home anyway, and it’s really not problem to walk in and buy only what I ran out of yesterday, or some special item I wanted for tonight’s dinner. It’s simple to shop for 5 or 10 minutes, five times a week, rather than one hour once a week, and never need more than a single bag of groceries at a time. And rather than being inconvenient, it’s actually great because I’m only buying what I need right now, the things I’m going to use as soon as I get home, so it’s very simple.

Allergies could be tricky, yeah. If you’re lucky the local shop, by nature of being smaller and more local, actually knows you and knows you need this stuff and stocks it because they know you’ll buy it from them. But that’s not a guarantee, for sure. That having been said, if the only people driving were people with corn allergies, the roads would be a much safer place!