When scary news is circulating around, it can be hard to resist the urge to grab everything on the store shelves, as if you can build a barrier around your family with it to keep you all safe. But it’s much better to keep calm and carry on, as they say, with a normal routine that’s already a bit shock-resistant.

My DH is an emergency room physician, so there is a non-trivial chance that our family will need to self-quarantine at home for some period of time in the upcoming weeks or months. (We had a close call last week, when we waited with bated breath for a day and a half, until a coronavirus test on a patient he saw came back negative). Virus scare or no, the CDC expects all American families to store at least two weeks of food and other supplies against “normal” events. It’s not hard to imagine how widespread problems (earthquake, anyone?) might make it convenient to have a bit more than that tucked away. Some folks also might like to have stores of food on hand to balance out income fluctuations. But it can be very disappointing to find that your five gallon bucket of rice has bugs in it. (Ask me how I know…) So storing that “food cushion” right needs to become part of the routine too.

Incidentally, I was chatting with a neighbor a couple of weeks ago, whose family belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a.k.a. the Mormons. Their faith encourages them to store a year’s worth of food, always. He admitted that they, like me, sometimes end up throwing away outdated food, despite their best efforts. I felt perversely better that even folks whose literal religion it is, sometimes have trouble getting this food waste thing worked out!

For a confirmed hoarder like myself, it can be hard to balance the urge to squirrel away large quantities of… everything! against the likelihood that no one in the house will EVER be hungry enough to want to eat yucky, stale food. And I really, really hate waste. It seems that the key to storing food right is… (drumroll, please…)

Store what you eat, eat what you store.

(I first encountered this bit of wisdom, along with many others, in Sharon Astyk’s terrific book about food storage and preservation, “Independence Days”.)

For us, that means choosing foods that are a normal part of our diet anyways, storing them correctly, and then cooking from those stores as part of the normal Tuesday (or whatever) routine, replacing them as needed. That way the stored foods never get too old. I know this is not genius, folks- first in, first out is pretty basic- but there are a few details that I’ve worked out that make it easier for us.

Rice, flour, sugar, etc. are great deals at Costco when bought in the big bags, but they really shouldn’t be stored in them. Moisture, bugs, bag failure- all looming disasters. Fortunately, Home Depot sells food-safe five-gallon buckets for about five bucks each. (I’ve seen the claim that you can get food buckets for free from bakeries, ice cream shops, etc., but every time I’ve asked, the employees have looked at me like I’m nuts. I think these must be reused or recycled within the industry now, instead of being dumpstered.) We keep smaller containers of each staple in the kitchen pantry for everyday use, and refill these from the big buckets as needed. I bought Gamma Seals, which are rims which attach to the top of the buckets with a lid that screws on and off, to make it more convenient to get in and out of the big buckets without prying off a lid with a screwdriver. (These run 8 to 10 bucks each on Amazon, when sellers are not gouging a vulnerable public with scare-pricing. Shame on those who are, and let the buyer beware…)

So when I get my monster bag of flour, let’s say, home from Costco, I first split it into gallon Ziplock bags. This makes it easier to deal with. You can pour your supplies right into your food-safe bucket (some people line them with Mylar bags, also available on Amazon), and this would be more space-efficient, but to my mind it’s way too messy and makes it harder to rotate your supplies without leaving a remnant of the old flour in the bucket when the new goes in. Because I have enough mess in my life as it is, I divvy up the flour outside on a card table and brush the inevitable spillage off into the grass. (Yet another advantage of living far enough away from neighbors that they don’t immediately observe my oddities- just read about them later! ☺)

Next, the gallon bags (with the date written on them in Sharpie) go into the chest freezer for a couple of days, as a magical ritual hoping to banish bug eggs, which would hatch later. I have no idea if this actually works as I’m practicing it- way too many conflicting reports about this on the interwebs, plus all the variables about freezer temperature, etc. etc.- but it makes me feel better. A 25-lb bag of flour fits into about 5 gallon Ziplock bags, and suddenly this storage thing doesn’t seem so unmanageable. When their Arctic vacation is over, the Ziplocks go into the storage bucket, and then I just have to start baking with them! If you only buy in bulk things that last quite a while- flour, sugar, rice, dry beans- and things that you will eat anyways, they probably won’t go bad on you as long as you don’t go completely crazy in the amounts that you purchase. Besides, the zombies will probably get you before you would eat through any more than one big bag, anyways.

As long as you have adequate supplies of whatever you need to make these boring basics part of your regular meals (Mexican seasoning for your beans? Soy sauce for your rice? Baking powder and yeast for your flour?), they can get you a long ways towards maintaining normalcy under weirder circumstances too.

WHAT NOT TO DO

Just a few personal bits of hard-earned wisdom:

*Nuts and whole grains go rancid faster than you would think, and if you’re anything like me, you won’t use them up as fast as your good intentions tell you that you will. They most likely should be purchased in smaller quantities and stored in the freezer, unless you’re really dedicated. Evidently rancid nuts, grains, and oils don't just taste bad, but contain compounds that are really unhealthy for you, so toss ‘em if they smell or taste funny. I’ve seen it claimed that some people can’t taste the rancidity, so if one family member tastes it but others don’t, you may want to go ahead and toss these items out of an abundance of caution. (Yes, I know it hurts. Gotta do better next time!)

*Don’t buy stuff that you don’t already eat, figuring “well, if it gets really bad…”. If no one eats Spam now, they are definitely not going to want to “learn to like it” under stressful conditions. There’s actually a condition called appetite fatigue, which mostly affects children and old folks, where under stress and presented with unfamiliar foods, they just … don’t eat. Not good! Comfort foods, basic things, are what you probably want to aim for.

Contrary to this idea, my DH wanted to stock up on a few cans of dehydrated emergency foods, which we obviously don’t eat regularly. I shrugged and made a few cracks about needing astronaut ice cream to go with our dried lasagna. I figure that my son will just have to serve as grubmaster for a few Boy Scout backpacking trips to get them used up, in the almost-certain event that we don’t end up needing them ourselves.

Also contrary to this, I had some canned chicken in the back of the pantry from an impulse purchase some time ago. I think it’s good to have some protein on hand in a fairly familiar form; my kids don’t like beans, and as I have found out in the past, to my great sadness, the freezer’s not a sure thing in times of trouble. ☹ But we don’t routinely eat canned chicken. So I’ve begun experimenting with it, to start to find ways to work it into our regular diet so it doesn’t seem like a “weird” item. Turns out it’s perfect for a quick pot pie, and tacos are next on the list to try. The texture is a little soft, like canned tuna (not surprisingly!), but it seems acceptable. So now not only do I have a decent protein pantry storage option, but I have an excuse to have a quick convenience meal now and then to keep it rotated. Win-win!

*Don't assume that Best-By dates are the same as expiration dates. Best-By dates generally refer to the time the producer guarantees the quality of the food. Things might get a little hard or dry or discolored or whatever after those dates, so it’s definitely good storage practice to try to use them up before that, but if you miss that date, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the food is unsafe to eat. Do a little Googling if you are in doubt about a particular item, and definitely use your eyes and your nose to weed out anything that “just ain’t right”, regardless of the dates, but I’d say don’t be afraid to try something that’s past the Best-By date, to see if it’s still acceptable to you. But do try to remind yourself of the items that tend to get overlooked and slide past their date, and the next time you are in a Costco trance, snap out of it, and just say no to over-purchasing those oddball items.

Like everything else in life, it seems, that ever-elusive quality of balance seems to be the key to storing food right. Or maybe flow is the key concept here: Not too much, not too little, match inflow with usage, keep it circulating, keep it steady. Deep breaths. Ahh, that’s better!

So here’s a fun fact for you: 21% of the food we Americans buy at the store gets thrown away, uneaten. This (from the USDA) swirled through my head this week as I faced down one of my most hated household chores- the pantry sort-out.

I periodically go through the two pantries at my house, chucking out the worst of the worst. I have a closet in my kitchen where I store frequently used and already opened food packages, and what we call the “gantry” (a name my DH was so proud of inventing, combining “garage” and “pantry”), which is not actually in the garage, but closer to the garage door, where I stock the unopened packages and larger storage buckets for bulk goods. This already tells you something of what you need to know about me- in today’s modern economy, with a family size of only four, I feel the need for offsite storage. And buckets. (This is not to mention another shelf under the stairs, which holds home-canned jars of food.)

It’s true that I live in the boonies, so running to the grocery store for a forgotten meal ingredient isn’t feasible, and buying in bulk can make sense to save money or excess packaging, and [Insert other increasingly implausible justifications here…]- the fact is that I store too much food. Something buried deep in my psychology tells me that I need to hoard food, and that unexamined urge also makes it hard, almost physically painful, for me to throw out food that maybe, just possibly, should be. Also, cleaning the pantry is boring. (Don’t you agree, Imaginary Reader? Any normal people have probably stopped reading [if they ever started], perhaps because they fell asleep, or perhaps because they actually died of boredom, which is what I felt I might do somewhere around hour two of The Great Pantry Decimation.) But taking stock and tossing is a crucial step in my household food waste reduction plan, so it was time once again to face the demons lurking in those back corners, and acknowledge my many food-procurement mistakes.

The tossing part may sound counter-intuitive, since my goal is to reduce waste, but sadly, things on my shelves get old before I use them. Also, those darn pantry moths, which seem to emerge once or twice a year, can sneak into way too many packages when I’m not looking them all over regularly, spoiling more food. And finally, when the shelves are overstuffed, it’s hard to see what’s there and think through how to use it up. And bonus reason: It’s so @#%! annoying when mostly-empty bags of chips are avalanching off the shelf.

So this week I welcomed the pain, and the shame too, throwing out:
*Those nuts and whole grains that had gone rancid;
*Stale cereal and crackers that didn’t get finished before a new box was opened;
*Ancient, dark, hard dried fruit that no one will ever, ever eat;
*Far-past-date boxed goods that I forced myself to honestly evaluate and admit that they will not one day suddenly seem like a good idea to base a meal on;

...and so much more. I won't entertain you (or perhaps horrify you, depending on whether you've ever eaten dinner at my house) with the oldest item I found, but suffice it to say that I was mentally comparing it to the age of my children, one of whom is now learning to drive. It added up to a lot: over a full garbage bag’s worth, much of that bulky packaging, but definitely not all. Looking at the results of failure, a lot of them all at one time, will (I hope) help memorably impress upon me why I’m trying to reduce our waste. I'm intending to use the shame to stop me from buying more weird, hard-to-use-up ingredients, going Costco-blind for too-large quantities, not planning ahead and then buying fresh ingredients to make a quick dinner without surveying what I already have, buying things that I hope we’ll learn to like (as if!), not storing things properly (nuts and whole grains in the freezer! Not the pantry!)… So many mistakes that I’m going to have to try to learn from.

Some notes from the process:
It’s harder for me to let go of (once) healthy ingredients than the junk food. I keep rationalizing, sometimes for years after the best-by date, that I really will use that nutritious but not-so-yummy and rather aged ingredient in some family-pleasing or self-flagellating dish, (whichever), some day real soon… Meanwhile, I'm embarrassed that I bought the junk in the first place, and thinking “We shouldn’t be eating this garbage anyways!” makes it much more comfortable to dispose of the evidence. But I need to remember that the junk food, being generally much more processed, has high embodied energy. This is the total quantity of energy that it took to grow, harvest, process, package, ship, advertise, display, etc. etc., those year-old Girl Scout cookies. So empty calories do not equal guilt-free tossing. (Sniff…)

I keep thinking that I need systems, pantry rotation schemes, lists… but the fact is, those elaborate, Rube Goldberg -style plans are never going to work for me. Why don’t I write it all down? Well, you see, this ain’t my first rodeo. I’ve done the thing in the past where I wrote down all the items I needed to use up, and tried to keep a written inventory of what was actually in the fridge, freezer, and pantry, and then tried to meal-plan around that. While this seems like such a brilliant idea, I have to confess that it hasn’t been that useful for me. I never manage to keep the lists updated, and usually end up losing the list itself. So I’m not going to advocate a strategy that I haven’t been successful with. I’m at the stage in my life when I finally am getting to realize that I am who I am, and I can’t count on some of the basics of my personality actually changing. Fabulously organized, I am not. I’m going to try to keep it simpler and just not buy so much stuff. And what is here, in the house, is what I’m going to try to use up.

While I didn’t quite go all Marie Kondo on my kitchen shelves, I did create some daylight between the survivors. The results of all that tossing are a practical benefit too, not just a psychological growth opportunity, since now I can actually see what I have left in my pantry. I also should have an updated mental list of what I don't need to buy when I’m at the store, and hopefully my subconscious will work away at good use-it-up ideas for the odd bits and pieces I came across in my shelf management process. I’m going to take a deep breath, celebrate by tying on a fresh pantry-moth trap, and go figure out what’s for dinner. Again.

1/04/19
It’s shortly after New Year’s, and I’m beginning this effort the way I usually approach a problem: by settling down at the kitchen counter with a beverage and a notebook, to start listing and planning. I need to clean out the pantries and freezers, I need to make meal plans, I need to look up some recipes, check how long certain things last, do some cost analyses… but I know that a total reform of all my kitchen habits is too much to bite off (so to speak) in a day, so how about I start just with the most time-sensitive of the elements right now: what’s in the fridge, and what’s for dinner? Conveniently, it’s also a perennial problem (Every day, they want to eat!) and one my family is beginning to pester me with right now. So helpful, they are. So here we go.

*Instead of my usual thinking beverage, a cup of tea (ok, a pot of tea), I’m pouring a pomegranate “mocktail” to begin to use up the half of a giant bottle of Pom juice, given to me by my dear mother-in-law, that is currently hogging my fridge. I had to buy the club soda to go with it, but at $1 a liter on sale for my mixer, I’m still way ahead. 30 ounces of Pom Wonderful will go a long way (that tangy stuff is powerful!). Plus, I feel all fancy while I'm plotting my evening meal of leftovers.

*For the kids, leftover homemade pizza with a side of some broccoli from the crisper drawer that needed trimming but was OK to steam up today, maybe not so much later in the week. I heated up the pizza stone to re-crisp the pizza crust. No need to invite complaints about soggy old pizza this early in the game.

*For DH and myself, leftover black-eyed peas with cornbread and fixings from New Year’s Day. What better way to usher in a prosperous New Year than to respect what we have already?

We need to eat those leftovers up soon, though, because cornbread just doesn’t last that well, I’ve found. It tends to go sour from the bottom pretty quickly on the countertop- I’m not sure why. It’s the milk and eggs in it, I guess. I might be able to refrigerate the leftovers, but would the crust go soggy, or would it pick up odors from the fridge? Does anyone do this? I’d like to find a way to recycle our cornbread, but we don’t really love cornbread dressing. Maybe I’ll try a bowl of cornbread with milk and maple syrup for breakfast. It doesn’t sound super appetizing, but I’ll attempt to channel the Ingalls family while I try it. (Doesn’t it sound like something Ma, Pa, Laura, and Mary would eat? Baby Carrie, too, of course. Mushy cornbread would be right up her alley.) Meanwhile, I’d welcome other ideas. Or maybe I’m making this too hard, and I should just straight-up eat it with honey or jam as a snack. Duh.
[Update: the chickens will eat cornbread that goes funky while waiting for me to make up my mind.]

*I also tossed out the Rooibos tea from the pantry. I tried to drink a cup as my thinking beverage, but I do not like it, Sam I am. It hasn’t gotten any better since I bought it in 2013.

So there we go. One small step for dinner eaters… well, that’s all, really. No giant leaps for anyone. But life is made up of small steps, isn’t it? We ate some leftovers, I saved some produce that was headed toward the compost bin, whittled down the supply of a kind of hard-to-use-up ingredient, tossed one unappealing item from the overstuffed pantry, and hopefully started some better habits. And I’m gathering strength for a big step- I’ve gotta tackle those pantries next. Heaven help me!

What are you eating up tonight?

[By the way, I'm very new to blogging. If anyone has advice on the Dreamwidth platform, or things you wish I would set up or eliminate from this page, please let me know. I have no idea what most of these thingies do.]