Your stocked pantry is an emergency plan. It's also an investment program. You keep it stocked so there will always be something to eat. You buy when you find a deal, then save money down the road when prices are higher. You buy low and eat high. Your pantry holds a lot of value for your household.
Do you keep track of expiration dates on consumable products? In my opinion, there's nothing worse for a grocery budget than to stock up on something only to have it go rancid before you can consume it. This is true not just for food, but also other consumable items like toothpaste. Toothpaste and OTCs may not go rancid, but they can lose their effectiveness. Dates on those products matter too.
As my pantry is emptying out this spring, I find this to be a good time to check the best-by and use by dates on our packaged foods. You can slide a bit on the best-by day for some foods, but others (particularly those with fat content -- oils, nuts, seeds, whole grains) can go bad. As I check the dates on products, I organize the packages by their dates. Even if I originally placed the new behind the old, the cans and packages get jumbled when we're searching for something in particular. It only takes a few minutes to reorganize, but those few minutes could potentially save me from wasting some of our food inventory. In addition to organizing by date, I can see if I'm on the border of being overstocked. By touching base with my pantry contents, I reduce the chance of buying too much of something.
So yesterday I took a few minutes to check dates. I discovered I had 6 canisters of cocoa powder in the back-up pantry. Yes, I do like my chocolate. So I stock up! Here's an interesting thing. I have 6 canisters, but with 3 different dates stamped on the bottom. I must have bought a few every couple of weeks when I was at WinCo.
I also went through the canned and bottled goods and small bags and boxes of grain products. While moving the oldest to the front of the line for each type of food, I also moved a couple of items to a highly visible spot, as they need using sooner than anything else.
We talk about expiration dates causing food loss, but there's a yuckier thing that I've dealt with that resulted in wasted foods. I'm talking about pests. Forgotten packages of flours and grains pushed to the back of the shelves can unknowingly be harboring moths and weevils. It's easy to monitor your supplies periodically, but time consuming and difficult to get rid of those pests once they invade your pantry. Just when I thought I'd eradicated them and moved my flour back into that cupboard, they repopulated the new grains. It took a lot of work to get to the point it was "safe" to use those shelves again.
Just as you take care to safeguard your other valuables from loss, it's important to prevent loss in the pantry. For someone who abhors waste, it's painful to have to throw something away because it has gone rancid, tastes off, or has bugs. I feel I've let my household down when this happens -- I've wasted money. And I feel like I've wasted food that could have fed someone that was hungry if I'd watched the dates more closely. You can bet that I'll make sure I use all of this cocoa powder in good time. Stay tuned for lots of chocolatey recipes to come.
