Who hasn’t experienced it? Your fridge is crammed with food but as you systematically look for something you want to eat you discard options because you know the food is either past its prime or outright spoiled. You pry open the freezer drawer or door to look for something to defrost for dinner and it stresses you out because there is so much food in there that has permafrost on it. Your dry storage cabinets look like a mishmash of half-eaten bags and boxes of food and you’re afraid to look at the outdate on your canned goods. And let’s face it, the ONLY time your fridge really gets cleaned is when something spills in it.
Me? I’m there. Or, at least I was. Last weekend, I broke down and cleaned the fridge. Why? Not because something had spilled, ironically. Instead, I needed to get groceries and I was sick of trying to figure out what we had and what we needed because the fridge was crammed. It also aligned with a new initiative I had started in August: getting control of my grocery bill. Not to go too far down the rabbit hole, there are two people and two cats in this house. Our grocery bill was regularly topping $900 a month. Recognizing that it had truly gotten out of control, I wanted some sense of how and why I was overbuying and to reasonably trim back the bill without compromising the quality of food we ate. My sense was that it wasn’t the quality of food driving up the cost, although I do like to cook mostly from scratch using fresh foods. Instead, it was the quantity. I was buying too much food, we were eating less than half of it and at least 75% of that waste was going into compost.
So, I cleaned out the fridge to see what we really had and what we really needed. It worked. For the past week, we have had plenty of food to eat in the house and the fridge is not overflowing. Plus, since August 1st, I’ve managed to cut my food bill considerably. That got me thinking. It’s a point of stress to open our freezer drawer. While I can keep the basement freezer relatively organized and it’s not stressful, the kitchen freezer drives me nuts. Not just me, it also drives my husband nuts. Half of the time, I avoid pulling open the freezer for the same reason the fridge stressed me out. Opening the freezer just showed me how much food we had wasted but didn’t have to account for because we hadn’t yet composted it.
This weekend, it’s all getting cleaned out. The freezer, the dry storage, even the super dry storage. I’m going to bite the bullet, face my husband’s disappointment that we have – again – wasted so much food and I am going to clean out the rest of the kitchen food storage. By the end of the weekend, I will have an organized freezer, pantry and cabinets. There will be a lot less food in them and I will do my best not to rush out to the grocery to restock them chock full with food we will have to throw out a year from now.
But here’s the deal. I also recognize how and why this is happening. First, I am my mother’s daughter and she was her mother’s daughter. My grandmother, who had gone through the Great Depression, had enough food stored away in her house that when she passed away each of her eight kids were able to take home at least a family’s week worth of groceries. My mom, stating that she “lived 14 miles from town” when she lived in the tiny hamlet of Willow Creek stocked up on so much groceries that we had to buy her a second pantry in her house in Lakewood, where she was only two miles from the grocery. So, I come by this habit honestly. It was passed down from mother to daughter.
The second reason this is happening is that, like my mom, I live out of town. Technically, I’m about 8 miles from town. It’s not a big deal really except when dinner is supposed to be on the table in 10 minutes and you just realized you are missing an ingredient. That sets off a mad scramble. Either you find a way around it or you attempt to slow down the whole cooking process to spend 15 minutes driving in and then back out to get whatever it is you needed. Either way, it never works. Either the food tastes funny or the food is overcooked. So, overbuying is a remedy of sorts. You feel like you give yourself the opportunity to not run out of key ingredients at a critical moment. Except, of course, you somehow manage to overlook something and you still indeed do run out of a key ingredient.
The point is, I have come to a cognitive understanding that my logic is just plain hokum and that I am making bad decisions based on historical precedents that were not good examples. Plainly said: I’m overbuying, overstocking and wasting food. That not only costs money but is incredibly wasteful. I had silently committed at the beginning of this month that I was going to try and get my food bill under control. So far, that’s worked. But the key to keeping it under control is to change behavior and habits that allow my overbuying habits to flourish. Avoiding opening the cabinets, fridge or freezer to find out if I really need an ingredient and just buying the ingredient anyway is one of the habits I need to break. And by having a more organized kitchen food storage system with less food but more usable food, I can plan meals and plan to use up ingredients more efficiently so that those perishable items don’t languish in the fridge but instead get put to use.
So, it’s on, baby. The freezer – and all of the stressful things it means to me – is on my docket for the weekend. And post freezer, it’s the dry storage. By the end of this weekend, I will be cleaned up and cleaned out. I will know what I have, how much of it I have and what needs to be used up first.
We shall see if cleaning up and cleaning out has the impact on my grocery bill that I think it’s going to have. Candidly, I believe it will. But check this space for an update. The operations expert in me says we need to see not just what happens in August, but what happens in September, October and beyond. I’ll need to prove I can sustain both the reduced food bill and the reduced waste over time to prove that old dogs like me can really learn new tricks.
Hang on, folks. It’s the Great American Cleanout!
The Yuppie Homesteader 