Cleaning Out the Pantry

Am I weird because I actually enjoy cleaning and organizing? 

I get 4 track outs a year and I usually spend time during each one giving our apartment a deep cleaning. I've also gotten into the habit of cleaning things out and getting rid of stuff during my March track out. 

This "cleaning out" is especially important to me this year. I read 7: an experimental mutiny against excess earlier this year and reviewed it here if you're interested. The point of reading this book was not to copy exactly what the Hatmaker family did. The point for me was to reiterate just how blessed I truly am and to fight our materialistic and self-seeking culture. 

Now, some of you may be like me and think "I don't have that much stuff." But if we think about how much we have in comparison to the majority of the world, we're rich.

I decided to start my apartment overhaul by cleaning out my pantry. I have really been feeling like I need to change how I eat. I eat such unhealthy food and I also eat more than I should. It's become a bad habit that I need to break. As I show you my organized pantry, I'll explain how I hope it will help my eating habits as well. 

I doubt that many of you reading this have ever wondered where your next meal is coming from. I know that I never have. I grew up with a full pantry, refrigerator, deep freezer, cabinets, and a grocery store 10 minutes down the road. This habit of keeping the pantry stocked has continued now that I have a place of my own. Food is easily accessible in my own apartment and down the road in multiple directions. Why does my pantry need to be full while so many around the world barely get one meal a day? Why are people all around the world starving to death while I have the opposite problem-I'm gaining weight?! This isn't right. 

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I started by taking everything out of the pantry and of course, I forgot to take a "before" picture.

Side note-since February is a short month, we didn't make a big grocery shopping trip. We bought little things here and there that we needed. My hope was for us to eat some of the things that had been in the fridge and pantry for a while. So, this is what "we have nothing to eat" looks like: 

Here's what my organized pantry looks like:

I've had this shoe organizer in the pantry for a while now. All that stuff used to be on the floor of the pantry and it drove me crazy! I thought this was a simple and cheap way to get it off the floor.

This is the top shelf. I have my box meals (mainly my "Doomsday Preppers" stash of Hamburger Helper) in the back. Then I have pasta, rice, Ritz crackers, and cereal in the containers. A couple of these are Oxo Good Grips Pop Top containers that were given to us when we got married. I bought the rest of the containers at Walmart.

This shelf has snacks and chips. I have 5 snack containers and a small basket for chips. My hope is that this will keep us from buying too many snacks. Better Homes and Gardens sells their own version of pop top containers that are half the price of the Oxo brand.

This shelf has 2 small baskets for individual snacks, our bread, my peanut butter (I can't live without my peanut butter), and bags of rice, pasta, and mashed potatoes.

This shelf has miscellaneous stuff. Most of it is the type of stuff that has to be refrigerated once opened. This shelf also has all my sugar.

On the floor are 2 containers for more miscellaneous stuff-one of them is mostly baking stuff and our step stool.

These labels are made by Post-It and come on a roll like tape. They are supposed to be removable in case I need to change the label.

I also reorganized our refrigerator.

This is a "waste of space" under our counter which houses these plastic drawer things. I keep recipe books, aprons, oven mitts, kitchen towels, paper products, and canned food in these. 

I also used to keep a stock pile of food under this counter space. I am proud that that stock pile is now gone. The only food we have is what is in our pantry and fridge. I cut down on the amount of excess food we have because there are also things in the pantry that used to be housed somewhere else.

I don't know why I didn't organizer our food ages ago. I love just looking at it.