I have always been a neat and clean person. However, there is one crucial area where my organizational skills have not been up to par…the kitchen. This has been exacerbated by the fact that my pantry cabinets are quite narrow and deep, which… well frankly, it makes it hard to see and/or remember what all is in there. (*ahem* Of course, it doesn’t help either that my partner likes to whisper in my ear during shopping trips, begging to add various sweets to the cart…)
I think many of us have had a lesson in managing food and food waste during the COVID-19 pandemic. Of course, I always meant to improve my kitchen management skills, but the pandemic forced it into necessity. We are doing our best to limit our grocery trips to once a week (we don’t have a car, so that’s about as much as we can carry back at a time), so that means being careful about what we buy and making sure we can finish most of it within a week. Besides, I hate to waste anything, especially food. It’s wasted money, and more importantly it is needless waste of food that could have gone to those who need it.
What I have done over the past couple of days is review every single item in my pantry and fridge. I wrote down every item I owned, organized by category of type of food, with subcategories of what was thrown out and what was kept. Here are some data points from this experiment:
- 40 items were thrown out. The amount of waste ended up filling about three 13-gallon trash bags.
- Most of what was thrown out was opened and at least half-eaten. I think that my boyfriend and I will often eat part of something and either forget about it, or get tired of it and move on to something else. We are not the kinds of people who would benefit from buying food in bulk.
- If I buy something I don’t usually eat with the thought “Perhaps I will use this one day”, there is a 99% chance I will never use it.
- We barely eat processed meats like lunchmeat and sausage. It would be better to spend that money on fresh, raw meat. It has a much higher likelihood of being eaten, and is much healthier besides.
I am so glad I decided to go through with this “experiment”! Our kitchen is far cleaner and more organized, I have a better idea of my eating habits and how to organize shopping trips around them, and I have a written inventory of food to refer to instead of rummaging through the pantry when deciding what to make for dinner.
What are your own tips for reducing food waste? Has the pandemic influenced your shopping habits at all? Have you ever tried cleaning your pantry in the method I described?
The pandemic has definitely influenced my fiance and I’s shopping habits. We try to limit trips as much as possible, so we find ourselves buying and, consequentially, freezing a lot of meat. This is actually working pretty well for us. By deep freezing it, we can always pull it out when we need it and cook ourselves a good meal.
I’ve never tried to clean out the pantry before (mainly because we just moved into the house a little while ago, so we just filled it ^-^’) but I do need to work on organization within the pantry. We have very limited space, only one pantry cabinet and some side shelves, so we are always trying to find storage solutions.
Also, I totally relate to your mention of your partner asking for sweets….because I’m the one who always does that to my fiance, hahah! ^w^” That’s part of my motivation to get back into baking, so that we don’t have to keep buying sweet treats for my sweet tooth. Though, my fiance does have his own soft spot for sweets (mostly ice cream).
I like this post very much! It was interesting to learn about your experiment! Perhaps I should run an experiment to see about sorting out my craft supplies……. Hmm. ^-^
We are freezing a lot of meat too. The only downside is defrosting it in time for cooking. Do you defrost quickly using cold water? I find leaving it in the fridge for 24 hours works best but obviously that takes a lot of time, and I haven’t quite mastered being able to plan my meals in advance…
Oh yes, if you have the time for it then baking your own sweets is the best! The main problem for me right now is I can’t find general all-purpose flour *anywhere*. I might just give up and start baking with gluten free flour instead.
If you do try to organize your supplies I’d love to read about it! Thanks for commenting as always~
We defrost by putting the meat in the fridge the night before, then taking it out an hour/thirty minutes before cooking. My fiance is big into cooking/meal planning, so he’s very organized about all that sort of thing. What we do to plan is we take inventory of what we have, then schedule out recipes using what we have for each week. We also write it up on our household dry-erase calendar, to make sure we stay on-track.
As for the flour, that’s such a shame that you can’t find all-purpose flour. Have you found self-rising or anything similar? Though I am sure you could find recipes online for gluten-free flour baking! Best of luck!
Oh, and if I do get to organizing my supplies, I’ll be sure to post on my blog about it, especially if I learn any new tips! ^-^
Ahhh you guys are organization goals! I need to buy one of those dry-erase calendars!
I actually do have a nearly full bag of self-rising flour but for some reason I assumed you couldn’t use it to make cookies…I just looked it up and I was wrong. D’oh…I still have a lot to learn ^-^;;