Unstocking the pantry
I often get requests from readers asking me to put together “bare minimum” lists. Lists that answer the question: How many items of X should I have and should I even have Y? I understand the desire for such lists — we’ve even written a few in the past — but they’re always met with mixed reviews. What works for me doesn’t necessarily work best for you.
That being said, I recently stumbled upon two great “bare minimum” lists for kitchen pantries in the Chicago Tribune. Instead of thinking about them as lists of must-have items, I thought about them as guides to figuring out what was clutter in my cupboard. If something in my pantry wasn’t on either list, I put it on the dining room table for further evaluation.
After this sorting process, I constructed a series of meals to use up the extraneous items. Most of these questionable items were nearing their expiration dates, too, so it made for a worthwhile activity.
Check out the lists and consider using them as clutter identification guides for your kitchen pantry:
Posted by Erin on Mar 18, 2009 |
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31 comments posted
Posted by Jeannine - 03/18/2009
Growing up on a farm, I am very familiar with stocked pantries. In fact, we had what we called a “cold storage room” which was a room with cement walls/floors in our basement that was filled with shelves which were STOCKED with years’ worth of food.
My mother’s penchant for stockpiling food might have been a bit excessive, but I do understand stocking up if you live and hour or more from a large grocery store.
These days, however, I revel in the fact that I can plan out our week’s meals, make a list, and go to the grocery store each weekend to buy what we will use that week, and only that week. By the next weekend when it’s time to go shopping again, our fridge and cupboard are fairly bare — and I love it! I get great pleasure in only buying what I know we will use in the next week — something about knowing all the food is fresh, and that I’m not wasting money on food I’m not sure we will actually use.
I do have a membership at Sam’s Club, which we use to purchase things we use in large quantities – toilet paper, paper towels, kleenex, detergent/softener, and chicken breasts. Otherwise, I buy on a need-only basis. Rarely when I forgot to put something on my list that I need that week, I can just stop by the grocery store on the way home from work, but that doesn’t happen often.
If you live in a town or city and have time to grocery shop once per week, I don’t see a big need to keep the pantry stocked with much of anything.
Posted by timgray - 03/18/2009
what you stock in your pantry depends on your lifestyle and habits.
If you bake and cook a LOT, you need more than those that think baking their own bread weekly is insane.
If you cook Creole all the time you need different items than if you cook Curries a lot.
Sit down and look at your list of basics that you ALWAYS use. and start there. Also be sure you rotate stock, it’s really easy to have a can of black beans that has been there for 4 years because you always put the new on top or in front of it.
Posted by Christine - 03/18/2009
My boyfriend and I are lucky enough to live in a dense and safe city with an organic grocery co-op three doors down where almost every item is cheaper and higher-quality food than the Stop and Shop four blocks away. We also have a Whole Foods, a Trader Joe’s, and an excellent butcher shop within walking distance.
Since neither of us owns a car (public transportation is dependable), we are forced to shop on a need-only basis, or at least a need-to make frequent trips and need-to think over whether we want to carry something heavy home.
As a result, our fridge and cupboards are almost always bare, but we end up eating loads of very fresh food, and very little ever expires or goes bad.
Posted by pistachio - 03/18/2009
Check out the photos of this household’s pantry. It’s so fully stocked, it could almost be considered hoarding, except that it’s obsessively organized.
http://heart-2-heart-online.co.....ed-part-2/
Posted by christa - 03/18/2009
Pistachio, I think this woman in the heart 2 heart pics has a problem, althought it’s definately not with organizing! Why on earth would one need 15 cans of sardines?!!
Posted by Karyn - 03/18/2009
Those healthy lists sound pretty much like the kind of food I keep on hand. For perishables like produce and dairy, I buy a few days’ worth, or maybe a week’s worth, at a time. It helps that I work five days a week at a grocery store.
What I don’t get at my store, I get at the local co-op, which happens to be walking distance from my apartment, thus also providing incentive for exercise.
I do stock up on staple items like beans and pasta, and frozen items like my favorite brand of frozen seafood, because I like to take advantage of sale prices and be good to my budget, but I am also realistic: I’m not going to crowd my limited living space with two years’ worth of I-can’t-believe-what-a-steal-this-reduced-sodium-organic-soup-is. :O I generally buy what I think I’ll use in three to six months. Even in the midst of a Minnesota winter, that’s plenty.
(The way I see some people shop before an expected blizzard, you’d think we were still living in the days of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter! Hey, folks, it’s 2009, and we do have a fairly efficient system of snowplowing, now.)
I think obsessively stocking up is rooted in an internalized fear of lack. At some point we have to be willing to trust in the Universe/Divine/Life/Dumb Luck will provide what we need, as we need it, and relax and live each day as it comes.
One thing I’ve learned NOT to stock up on is junk food, even “healthy” junk food, because experience has taught me that it does not stay stocked up for long–to the detriment of the far healthier fruits and veggies I would otherwise be snacking on!
Posted by pistachio - 03/18/2009
I know! Scary isn’t it? She could really benefit from the healthful pantry links that Erin posted. The ribbon collection is unbelievable.
Posted by littlepitcher - 03/18/2009
I keep a country pantry, since I have access to a garden, a farmers’ market, and free fruits. My single biggest “clutter” problem is the storage of Mason jars once they are emptied, and until they are refilled, since these number in the hundreds.
The 15 cans of sardines? Two cans of sardines a week, for the two seafood servings recommended by nutritionists, will provide several times more Omega-3′s than all of those ghastly fish oil capsules. You only have to endure catfood breath for a few minutes instead of all the time as you would with caps.
Posted by knitwych - 03/18/2009
Check your local farmers’ markets for dried beans and legumes. Ours has a great organic vendor, and several other vendors sell dried beans and so on. I shop there regularly, as well as at the local natural food stores (EarthFare and an independent co-op). I learned a long time ago that keeping basic staples on hand saves money! As long as there are lentils and rice in the house, I know I won’t starve – and I’m a lot less likely to dash off to a fast-food joint.
As for the photos in the link Pistachio posted, I’m just gobsmacked. Yes, the woman is organized, but holy cr@p! If that’s the Octo-mom’s pantry, then maybe having all that food on hand would make sense, but if there are just one or two kids in the family, it’s perfectly indicative of OCD and hoarding. The giveaway for me was the comment about how this woman’s nanny tends her kid’s belongings. Anybody with a nanny and that much stuff on hand really isn’t living in the real world, IMO.
Posted by Re - 03/18/2009
I have given up on having a well stocked pantry as we currently have an overstocked one. I used to try to be frugal and stock up on necessities. However, I have come to discover that once something goes into the pantry or fridge it becomes “invisible” to my DH and never gets eaten unless I cook it. So I am constantly trying to use up what is in our pantry.
Pistachio – I imagine that woman has a large family, does A LOT of entertaining and runs a catering business.
Posted by Sharon - 03/18/2009
I stock up on buy one get ones. My pantry is organized, I use everything before it goes bad, and it saves me a ton. I don’t have nearly as much as the link posted a few comments above, though. That was A LOT, especially of junk food. I do have about 10 boxes a cereal that was BOGO (will last us a month), a case of tomato sauce from Sam’s, a case of tomato paste from Sam’s, and about 12 boxes of pasta that were BOGO (will last about 3 months). If Campbell’s select soup goes BOGO, I’ll buy 10 cans (we use 2 a pop, so this is 5 meals- we’ll go through that in 2 months). It’s about knowing how much space you have, and what you can comfortably use before an item expires/it goes on sale again. Just buying to have tons of food in the house that you could not go through in months and months is a whole other thing.
Posted by JC - 03/18/2009
Our “pantry” reflects our lifestyle. Living in a house in semi-rural Alaska is a different than living in a city apartment just doors down from the local shops. We have a country pantry as above with preserves of veggies, fruits (bought in bulk in summer when the trucks come through), jams, soups, etc. We also have a large freezer for the wild game and berries we process ourselves. We have space to properly store the large amounts of grains and legumes we buy in bulk. Work is often seasonal without a regular reliable income, having properly stored food carries us through those times with no problems.
@ littlepitcher, those mason jars can become troublesome. We keep all the boxes the jars come in and store them in a separate area of the basement. We have narrow shelving alongside one wall that clean jars go on. After use, we wash the jar and cover the top with a piece of plastic wrap and a ring to keep the inside relatively dust (and dead spider) free. When we have a full case of a particular size, it is boxed and put in the proper area. When it comes time to reuse, all we have to do is run the jars through a quick sanitary rinse cycle in the dishwasher and they are good to go. The healthy home canned foods we eat are a great return on the hassle of storing the empty jars.
Our house does NOT at all resemble heart2heart’s. That’s just bizarre. Her son is a budding clotheshorse. I don’t think our entire family of four has that many items of clothing, including our winter gear.
Posted by allen - 03/18/2009
complaint on the first pantry list: Butter is in fact more healthy then margerine. Just saying.
I still keep margerine around, becuase i prefer it’s taste on toast. a learned thing from my childhood, i’m sure.
Posted by Karyn - 03/18/2009
@allen: Yeah, I meant to mention that, too, about butter. Maybe the non-trans-fat margarines are healthier than the trans-fat ones, but butter is still my number one choice. I don’t eat that much of it–I keep only one stick in the fridge at a time, the rest in the freezer–but when the recipe (or my toast) calls for butter, I use butter. Generally, of course, extra-virgin olive oil is my Fat of Choice–that and avocadoes.
Posted by Tiffany - 03/18/2009
We have one kitchen cabinet that we can spare for pantry space, so we pretty much stick to Bittman’s list without noticing. Trying to get as much of our food as we can directly from the farmer helps, though we did have to break down and get a half-sized chest freezer to make that work (fitting THAT into our house was a challenge). And we’re going to try to do a lot of canning this summer, so I’m kind of dreading having all the empty mason jars around, but if we can stick to it, that will be temporary clutter endured for highly worthwhile results.
Posted by Kimberly Collins - 03/18/2009
Wow. The heart2 Heart chick is a hoarder for sure. Being organized does not mean that you are not a hoarder. That woman has a problem.
Posted by Michele - 03/18/2009
My grandfather was infamous for his bulging pantry (both the overstuffed shelves and the older-than-me cans themselves were bulging). When he died, we counted over four hundred cans of cat food. Many people I know/knew who lived through the Depression were the same way.
Posted by cv - 03/18/2009
I think for many people, myself included, pantry clutter isn’t caused by stocking up on things that are used all the time the way many of the commenters do. My problem comes when I buy something I use infrequently or for a new recipe and the rest of the package just hangs around waiting to be used up. I recently made an udon dish because I noticed half a pack of udon noodles sitting in the cupboard. I have most of a bag of hazelnuts because we needed half a cup for a (delicious, as it turned out) recipe, and there’s a good chance that the rest of the bag will get buried in the back of the cabinet. That’s the sort of thing that this kind of evaluation described here can really help with.
Posted by Sue B - 03/19/2009
Last summer I cleaned out the cabinet we use as a pantry and I threw away 3 kitchen garbage bags full of outdated/undated items of food. That was probably over $300 of food I never used (even if a lot of it came from Big Lots) that’s a lot of wasted money. We have 4 people in our family (2 little kids.) Since then I have tried not to buy things just to stock up unless it is something I use at least once a week. It also helped that I reorganized the cabinet to store like with like so things won’t get lost.
Posted by littlepitcher - 03/19/2009
JC–Roaches, spiders, and mildew love fruit jar cardboard–and any other kind.
We have benches built into the dining room which hold some; the remainder are stored in drums with lids. This keeps the bugs out. A plus is that if you need it, the plastic drums can be used for water storage while the jars are full.
Posted by catmom - 03/23/2009
I saw the link that Pistachio posted. Someone PLEASE tell me that it isn’t for real! Holy smokes! When my three brothers and I still lived with our parents we didn’t have near that much food stocked like in the photos. As for the photos of the linens, wrapping paper, dinnerware, etc. it looks like Bed Bath and Beyond. If that woman needs to make extra money, she could sell some of her stuff.
I’m in agreement with those who commented on the Heart 2 Heart link, how much stuff does one need?!
Posted by Open Loops 4/7/2009: Articles I Think Worth Passing Along—SimpleProductivityBlog.com— - 04/07/2009
[...] ran an article on “Unstocking the pantry“. This talks about what should be in a pantry if you are starting from scratch. My pantry [...]
Posted by MomLight.com - 07/14/2009
[...] _____________________________________________________ Read what the Unclutterer has to say about Unstocking the Pantry. And if organizing your pantry seems like an impossible task, here are [...]
Posted by chacha1 - 09/11/2009
I think it’s really revealing that the comments on the heart2heart site are all “wow, that’s so cool!” and the comments here are all “wow, that’s so sick!” LOL
De-stocking: it’s all in what matters to you. If you don’t mind eating mostly prepared foods, you can keep a lot more on hand. If you want fresh, you have to buy often and in small quantities.
Posted by Ramses - 03/21/2010
The Dawn Jackson ‘solution’ is exactly what is making the US and UK obese.
Ready meals, full of salt and sugar, higher carb, full of unknowns.
If she means meals cooked yourself with known ingredients then frozen, then it’s a different thing.
We aren’t all saints, so convenience comes into it from time to time – but no to stock up on ready meals with ‘healthy’ written on them. Let’s not be marketed to with food and know what we are eating.
Posted by Queue - 03/22/2010
I’m struck by the absence in comments here of two viable rationales behind stockpiling food: (1) for those of us who are stone introverts, to minimize the number of times we have to leave the house during our “down time” (weekends, vacations, etc.); (2) for those of us who are extroverts and entertainers, so that we will never not be able to take care of people in a key nurturing way – to feed the masses, no matter how massy they may be.
I’m not arguing for either of these as good/bad/indifferent. I just think it’s useful to realize that people have reasons that aren’t related to finances and/or mental illness for doing things such as stockpiling. (The Depression-related example someone gave in last year’s comments shows this, too.)
Posted by MusicDoc - 03/22/2010
I have been taught “Prepare ye every needful thing” which includes a years supply of the food, water and other items your family will need. In the past two or three years this has been whittled to 3 to 6 months (at a bare minimum to have 1 month’s worth) based on storage and monetary availability. We are also counseled not to go in debt for our food storage. This storage is not only for our benefit, but to help neighbors if necessary. I have made the mistake of not rotating my stock before and had to dispose of a great number of canned items. We now write the expiration on stuff in large print and try to place the items on the shelf according to which will expire first. I also had started a list of the contents of my “pantry,” but have to finish it. That will make shopping easier since I struggle to remember what is needed & what is not. (I make a list, but often forget it or don’t stick to it, but that’s another issue. ADHD)
I don’t have room in my kitchen for canned foods, multiple salad dressings/marinades, cooking oils, pasta, etc. We keep the extras on open shelves in the garage. I don’t have the years supply, but probably 3 months on most things. I also keep a large stock of paper goods because we use a lot of paper towels. (I recycle many things and try to be as “green” as possible, but hate germy sponges & dish cloths. Pre-moistened wipes are a waste os money.) Water is a big issue too. We had a water main break in front of our house and had issues for almost 10 days because the city couldn’t get their act together and the constant rain didn’t help. You never know what economic, natural or other strange disatster may hit your family so that you can’t run to the market every week. I prefer fresh, organic foods and produce too, but it’s nice to have the peice of mind that I have some back up. I’ve heard of too many stories of families that have had to live off of their food storage alone not to have it. The lady everyone is calling crazy, just may not be. She just might be totally following the counsel of church leaders – just maybe on the side of exact preciseness and she might have a huge family. Maybe they just love sardines too. We also keep an evacuation box (we live in hurricane country) filled with supplies for 72 hrs. This plus our camping gear ensures we have shelter, food, water, medication, clothing. etc for at least 3 days. We also have individual 72 hour kits should we become separated. These also include copies of important documents to prove who we are, where we live & that we are related. Things many people who were evacuated from Katrina could have used to find one another again. The whole thing makes me think of Aesop’s fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper.”
Posted by Bernice - 03/22/2010
Why did you post this when us Canadians cant register for the pantry sites? It tells us our zip code is invalid. Boo hoo
Posted by Julie - 03/22/2010
Wow; all I could think about as I scrolled through those pantry pictures was what clutter it was. CLUTTER ORGANIZED IS STILL CLUTTER!! I got the feeling that if she didn’t spend so much time organizing all the junk then she wouldn’t need a nanny. I’ve seen STORES that had less selection!
Posted by Deb in Portland OR - 03/23/2010
I do keep a well stocked pantry, approx 3 months worth of dry goods and other basics such as olive oil. I agree with musicdoc, and I believe that most families are very illprepared for possible disasters such as severe storms or several day power outages, etc. We’re not nutty survivalists, but we have made a conscientious decision to be more self sufficient.
We live in a rural area in a small town, approx 1 hr from the city. For us, it’s more cost effective to buy in bulk when we’re in Portland, then package the food into reusable food saver bags (important to label & date & rotate the food) and then store those bags in food grade buckets. However, we only stock up on items that we use regularly, and we don’t eat processed foods. We cook nearly everything from scratch. Having a well stocked pantry saves us an unplanned 15 minute drive into town for a single item.
There is definitely a difference in being well prepared and hoarding. I found that Heart 2 Heart pantry pics horrifying! Yes, it’s extremely well organized (hellloooo OCD), but how many linens, candles and ribbons does a family need?!
Posted by theora55 - 03/25/2010
The food seems like it will get used, although that’s a lot of snack food, but the surplus of dishes, wrapping paper, and other sheer stuff was overwhelming. I like having enough food that I can go a week without a grocery visit, and am working on resisting sales when I have plenty of the item at home.
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