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.
So true, and something I’ve dealt with just this week. I got ready to make some cookies. I opened a new bag of sugar only to find that it had bugs!! Ugh. I’ve had pests in flour but never before in sugar. I was going to compost the whole bag, but then I thought that the sugar could feed our hummingbirds. (One of the consumers of our sugar) The sugar itself looks fine but obviously not going to be used for human consumption. But my husband can use it to make the simple syrup for the birds that delight us. I’m thinking though that maybe I will now take my flours and sugar out of their paper bags and store them in clear containers instead.
ReplyDeleteHi Lynn,
DeleteI;ve never heard of bugs in sugar, except for ants. I'm glad you have a plan for using it. I think decanting your flours and sugar into clear containers that seal well is a great idea. If there are any rogue bugs that escaped from the sugar bag, they will want to find a new source of food. When I was a teen, we had an ant problem in our newly built house. My mother put all boxed and bagged food in the fridge to keep new ants from getting into those packages. We even kept the cats' dry food and cereal in the fridge. I think it took that whole summer to ensure no ants would return. I hate to think this, but I bet my mother used spray pesticides in those cabinets. Folks didn't know back then how harmful those could be.
Good luck to you. It sounds like you have a solid plan.
We had stocked up on some canned goods I can no longer eat, due to dietary changes, and also someone mistakenly bought six of a condiment we'll never use. I need to check those for expiration dates, because I thought I could take them to the local food pantry, if they're still good. We are blessed with enough freezer space to keep all grains in the freezer, so thankfully that's not been a problem in recent years. Sara
ReplyDeleteHi Sara,
DeleteOh that's happened to me, too. A food I could once eat gets crossed off my list, and we're left with a stock of that very food. One time it was barley. I had a large container of barley that I couldn't use in any family meals that I would also eat. I eventually used it all in "them" cooking, but it took a while. Ooops on that condiment. I hope it's still within dates so you can donate it somewhere.
My grand plan when both daughters are on their own (and we don't need to stock up so much on frozen vegetables and meats) is that I will be able to use that extra freezer space to store all our grains. I already store all of our corn products in the freezer. Corn meal and flour seems to get buggy long before other grains at my house.
Good luck on the containers of condiment that you can't use.