The declutter diaries – Food Storage

If you enjoyed my last ‘decluttering’ post, all about ditching the clutter of our kitchen utensils drawer (exciting, no?), then you are in for a right treat here. A post dedicated to the often much neglected but area(s) of the home that stares our souls in the face every day, our food storage. 

In our home we predominantly use a sliding tall food larder/cupboard, something that I’d been eager to have when we designed our new kitchen nearly 4 years ago. Whilst in theory the idea of a contained sliding storage system is a good one, and frees up more cupboard space for other clutter stuff, in reality it’s meant that due to our busy lives and it being a fairly decent space in which to plonk food, the whole thing has got really quite cluttered since 2012. Something which surprises having actually decluttered the thing, as both Adam and myself are on the whole organised, tidy people. Below is the ‘before’ photo of the slider (so embarrassing!). It’s like the food version of Monica from ‘Friends’ dumping cupboard!

Loosely, the slider has 5 different areas: Herbs and spices, tinned fruit/breakfast condiments, everyday tins (eg beans, chopped tomatoes), oils/squash, non-essential cooking jars/bottles. Over the last year or two, the cupboard has become less and less organised, which has meant that we haven’t really been able to see what’s in there properly, and much to my shame, on emptying the slider, we were left with a whole pile of out of date food which is terrible. Such a waste. 

I’m determined this won’t happen again! So we ditched/recycled the jars of all the ridiculously out of date food, and then I set to work organising the rest. First, I lined up all of our herb and spice jars (there were loads) to look for duplicates, and then checked the dates on all of them. In date ones that made the cut went back into the bottom of the slider.

I freed up almost half of this space! You may think I’m an organisational lunatic and wondering how I have time for all this sh*t, but trust me, you’ll feel good once you’ve done it. Again, I felt awful about how many duplicates we had- so unnecessary.

Next, I set about putting the rest of the in-date tins/bottles/jars back neatly in to their appropriate sections:

Tinned fruit/spreads/breakfast condiments…

Everyday tins and bottles… I had no idea we ate so many pulses and tuna- probably counter-balances that Marshmallow fluff in the previous picture <polishes halo>

Oils, drinks and porridge oats…

and finally, non-essential cooking items…

The finished look made me feel more amazing than it really should have done, and it means that we can now properly SEE what we have in the damn slider, and therefore not waste food, or let it go out of date so easily. I know that this can be inevitable for some foods/condiments that you buy for a one-off recipe, but the less wastage the better in 2016!

I wrote a list of things that we do use fairly often but are now out of date, and then added them to the food supermarket shop on my phone.

I’m going to have a sift through each food storage section once a month and sort it out, which should really only take 5 minutes.

Here’s to continuing our clutter-free year!