Hoarding

 I have done no research, just mild casual observations.  (Who wants to listen to experts anyway?) Even I, as careful and conscious as I am to avoid hoarding in all its forms, have fallen victim.  And so have you.  I am willing to bet that the average American household has at least enough food in it to feed four people for months.  Yes, months, at any given point in time.  This may / or may not be excluding milk and some fresh fruit or vegetables. This of course is during the normal running of our lives.  Add in holidays, parties, special occasions, or any other perceived issues, and the food storage/supply skyrockets. 

Let’s start with the easiest, the food that should be eaten first. I say easiest since it is typically one of the smallest food storage places in our house, the Refrigerator.  At last, it is a defined space with only so much room.  But speaking from experience, it is amazing how much stuff can be crammed in it.  More amazing is how much can get lost, forgotten, and wasted in such a confined space.   (There is a source for that funky smell.) Yet we have all opened the fridge, bulging with edible stuff, caught whatever was trying to escape, declared there was nothing to eat, and ordered takeout.

So, what’s in a typical fridge?  Eggs, bread, mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup, cheese, and some type of meat.  There is an assortment of beverages, obligatory takeout, and doggy bag containers.  These don’t consider the leftover pizza or the lunch from last week that still hasn’t been eaten.  Something is plastic rapped.  A tinfoil ball holds something, but you can’t remember what.  All the ingredients for that special meal are still there as well as the good-intentioned salad wilting in the bottom drawer.

Eggs = egg salad, hard-boiled, add cheese and meat for an omelet.  Leftovers are another meal or two.  Chinese takeout is at least three meals in and of itself.  Pizza is dinner one day and breakfasts the next.  Do I have to go into how far chilies, soups, and casserole dishes go?  You can put almost any form of leftover on a potato and call that lunch.  Try finishing off all the jars of pickled this or that before buying another jar.  Little known fact – you can cut regular pickles yourself into sandwich slices, rounds, or relish.

 

You can eat at least a week or two just off of what is currently in the refrigerator.

 

The pantry, dry good storage, all the stuff that is in the middle of the grocery store.  This has limitless storage possibilities.  And we do get creative.  Boxes and bags fill cupboards, shelves, line basement stares, and fall off the tops of everything in the kitchen.  Yet there is more shoved in every place that can be found even remotely close to the kitchen or on basement shelves.

How many boxes of cereal do you need?  You probably have at least three maybe four.  How many servings are in a box of cereal, 15?   Even if you double your portion sizes that’s still at least eight meals.  You have just fed everyone breakfast, dinner, or lunch for two days in one box.  And you have three more to go.  

Every household has at least two boxes of pasta and jars of sauce.  But they are not the ones we want so a special trip to the store to get more is necessary. Any house with kids has two boxes of macaroni and cheese. They come in 10 packs so there are probably at least five left at any given time.  Don’t deny it.  We all know you get them at the 10 for $10 sale.  No one buys just one box.  That’s dinner for a week, leftovers can be lunch.  The same is true for the packets of tuna, Rice-A-Roni, soup cans, pudding cups, and Jell-O, and the list is endless.

At least ½ a bag of potatoes is sitting at the bottom of the basement stairs.  Boxes of Bisquick, bags of flour, sugar, and assorted baking mixes hide on the top out-of-the-way shelves.  Uncle Ben’s rice, assorted bean mixes, hamburger helper, all varieties of powders, oils, and vinegar.  Let’s not forget all the can goods.  Soups, vegetables, creamed this or that, fruit, unopened pickled stuff, pie filling.  The jar of homemade specialty from a friend last Christmas.  Or was it the Christmas before?

Nuts, salsas, granola, chips, crackers, salad dressings, cookies, Little Debbie’s, all the stuff your mother told you shouldn’t eat but you do anyway because she doesn’t live in your house anymore.  What isn’t lost by sliding down the back of the fridge is toppling off the front every time the door opens. 

Every year when the bags come out for nonperishable food donations, how many of us have to go to the store?  Or do we just stock it up with all the canned goods that somehow ended up in our house even though we have no idea why and have no intention of ever using them?  

How about the freezer?  Oh, you say this isn’t bad.  It is the smallest portion of the refrigerator.  But we have solved this problem.  Pinterest hacks abound on how to maximize this space.  Anyone with enough room has a spare appliance just to keep things frozen.  But of course, you know what is in it at all times, and stock is rotated regularly. 

Pounds of ground beef, packages of chicken, bacon, pork chops, chicken fingers, fish fillets, heat and eat in every form.  Packages of frozen vegetables that weird brown thing in the corner you have no idea where it came from or how long it’s been there. 

Do you need to go and make a huge three-cart shopping panic at the grocery store?  Where in the world are you going to put it all?  More importantly, how are you going to eat it before it all goes bad?   Never mind, the Twinkies will be fine.

Why are we stressing over stuff we don’t need? And this is just the fridge.  Let’s not talk about the basement, the hall closet,  or what’s under the bed.