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.
It's always good to do a pantry cleanout because even if you are well organized, things can get hidden. We try to keep things with a shelf life like flour in the freezer because bug infestations are never fun.
ReplyDeleteOur emergency supplies are stored in the basement where we could possibly be for a few days in an emergency. We put everything in plastic tubs to protect from water damage and to be easily picked up and carried for an evacuation.
They are in great need of being turned over. We try to rotate out and use the older things and put new things in. Sometimes we do that in a timely manner and sometimes we do not. :)
Hi Live and Learn,
DeleteIt sounds like you're prepared for various scenarios. Do you live in an area prone to tornados, hurricanes, or flooding? Do you stock your emergency totes with regualr canned and packaged foods or special preparedness foods? I'm afraid we don't have dedicated emergency foods in our home. I'm not sure where I'd store them, except in the pantry. Our main risk of disaster is earthquake. And we do have our share of power outages. I do always have a lot of canned goods and have a way to cook without electric power or gas.
Good luck turning over your supplies.
I realized about a month ago that I had bought a few boxes of couscous from Aldi on sale, and they were close to or just past their best-by date. We've had lots of couscous lately. :) You have brought up a very good point.
ReplyDeleteThefrugalgirl.com had a post awhile back about putting your flour in the freezer for a few days to kill any potential pantry moths (if I remember correctly, they lay their eggs there, but freezing the flour for a period of time will kill them). I have started doing that, and it's been helpful. We keep our cornmeal/polenta products in the fridge. That can be hard to do, depending on how much fridge or freezer space you have.
Hi Kris,
DeleteIf you lived near I would trade you some of our surplus rice and rhubarb for some of your couscous, and then we would both have variety.
I put my rice into the freezer for about a week when I first buy it to kill eggs of pests. It seems to work. I think I'll do that with new flour, too. Thanks for the suggestion.
Kris and Lili, we also heard this about killing bugs in grain goods years ago, which is part of why we store ours in the freezer when we first buy them, and leave them there when we can fit them. I'd forgotten until now, but one other factor was that we had unknown bugs in a bag of white rice, and they ate a BUNCH of it while it was in the pantry. They never escaped, but they chowed down on that rice! Also, I like flour/grain in the freezer because it keeps whole wheat flour, brown rice, and other less-processed grain products from having the oils go rancid. I hate that! Have a great day, everybody! Sara
DeleteOh Sara, the rice incident with the bugs must have been disconcerting. I'm glad they stayed in the rice and didn't find their way into other packages. Good point on storing whole grains to prevent fats from going rancid. I just received a large order of organic whole wheat flour. I need to pop those into the freezer.
DeleteEnjoy your evening, Sara!