An Organized Pantry is a Green Pantry

Part of our goal in living greener is to be less wasteful. I think we do well when it comes to recycling, figuring out where to consign clothes, having Pickup Please come and get unwanted household items, and growing our own food. However, this has not been my forte when it comes to grocery shopping, especially when our pantry looked like this.

Yeah, I didn’t know what was in there either. No wonder I kept buying maple syrup, oatmeal, and peanut butter when we already had plenty. When we moved in about three years ago, we just unpacked the food boxes and placed stuff in the pantry. As you can see, the system hasn’t been much better for a while. However, now that I can take advantage of nap time, I suddenly had an hour here or there in which to tackle this beast. My goal was to put the items that we use regularly at eye level and make the pantry layout something that could help me when I made our Wegmans, Whole Foods and farmers market runs. So, after some finagling, I got it to look like this.

Pantry

Pantry

Spice Cabinet

Our go-to items were at eye level, pasta and related cousins like couscous and quinoa have a shelf, cereals and baby food items are on the bottom and dried fruit, cream of wheat and Nutella take the top shelf. The spice cabinet even got an overhaul as I tossed items and reorganized where I keep the baking ingredients. Ah, sanity.

But, wait, that doesn’t look like all the stuff that was in there, you might say. Nope. There was a very large trash bag of expired food, which made me feel terribly wasteful for a few reasons. First, it’s wasted money. Part of our living green and simply mission embraces the goal that we can live with less. Clearly, those end of aisle displays caught my attention a time or two and I did some impulse buying. Secondly, we also had foods that we had received as gifts that we didn’t like. In retrospect, we should have passed those on to other friends or family so that someone could use it or paid more attention to when the post office does their canned goods and other foods pickups. Thirdly, I became very accustomed to eating something different each day when I was in college. We had a great place to eat in my last two years and I became spoiled. I continued to live like that for many years afterward. I shunned leftovers, threw food out all the time and generally, didn’t think of the global impact that it might make. If I consume less, and I consume more wisely, maybe there will be a small effect on the way that we produce food in this world. Living locally, living simply and buying less packaged goods is a good start to show how I choose to spend my dollar.

One area that still remains a spot to simplify and organize is the countertop. I have some good canisters for pasta, flour and sugar. I need to reassign the brown sugar one to be one for the regular sugar and pop rice into the current sugar one. We’ve been eating it a lot lately, so that could keep it more readily at hand by the stove. We have another pantry directly across from the reorganized one. Hopefully, I can take a look through there and figure out what small kitchen appliances I can store in there and which we really need out on the counters. I have a good feeling that we may be able to be microwave free.

As we aim to be better about expiration dates on the few canned and packaged goods that we buy, I put some to use this week. While the mix is not organic, the celery, carrots and ham that I added were. The soup itself will last several days, so we can stretch a dollar. I would like to use the slow cooker at least once a week in order to make a few lunches. I’ll have to dust off my Fix It and Forget It cookbook, explore some good recipes, and dive into being less wasteful with our food.