It’s Safe to Use Up Your COVID Pantry Now

​I’m never going to forget the first time I went into a grocery store and found all the shelves empty, the freezer bins ready to be set up as individual hot tubs for all the good they were doing anyone.

I’m also never going to forget the next three stores I went to, and how empty they were as well.

It was a rough month and I doubt any of us will ever completely let it go.

Now is the time, though, to realize that it would take an awful lot more than a global pandemic with millions dead to completely disrupt the food supply.

However we might feel about it, choices were made on higher levels. People would be called in to work, and in the first key months, they would be prohibited from wearing masks. Hundreds of thousands of people would die unnecessarily. Meanwhile, other people around the world maintained their ability to access such things as cinnamon rolls and children’s toys, chewing gum and energy drinks, fudge sauce and rum.

Whatever you want, at least in the US, you can get it. Not only that, you can probably get someone to deliver it right to your doorstep.

This is why I think we can pretty much rest assured that we will continue to be able to buy groceries throughout our lifetimes.

When I was a kid, the topic often came up of older people who had lived through the Great Depression. They hung onto (read: hoarded) all sorts of stuff that we considered useless, such as stacks of newspaper, empty cans, glass jars, and seemingly every consumer item they ever bought.

We don’t want that for ourselves, do we?

We can consciously acknowledge that we have been scarred and traumatized without acting that out in pointless hoarding behaviors, right?

I have done a lot of work with hoarders, and I can say right now that food hoarding is almost impossible to beat back. I think it only arises when some neurochemical switch has been flipped. Is there some form of therapy that might help a food hoarder to recover? I have no idea.

The best I can do is one of two things.

I can say that I myself have food hoarding tendencies, and that I am probably 95% cured.

I can also say that it’s probably harmless to examine one’s own behavior and question why one acts the way one does.

Does this serve me?

Does it really?

I think the solution to food hoarding is to keep looking at the evidence. What *exactly* is in all those cans and bottles and jars and bags and packages?

There is a way to maintain and rotate a pantry and keep up to four years’ supply of food on hand. I learned it from my mother-in-law, who did all her own gardening and canning. She kept it all in a cool room that she had designed herself, built for her by her husband on their own property.

If this is your dream, sounds great! Are you willing to learn her system or are you going to wing it? Because that kind of thing is a lot of work.

My MIL was one of those people who is up at sunrise. She busted her butt every single day in that garden. It took a lot of work to organize, sanitize, and even label everything. She had all her canning jars lined up by type of food and year canned, and she would rotate so there was never anything over four years old in her supplies. (Because it isn’t safe and it also drains of nutritional quality over time).

Personally, as much as I admired her, that has never been my dream lifestyle.

It always boggles my mind how many of my people fantasize about such throwback activities as churning their own butter, yet they can’t keep up with modern conveniences like unloading the dishwasher or the washer and dryer.

In 1890, housework was a full-time job. Even by the 1920s it took over 50 hours a week. Why would anyone yearn for that, I ask of you??

Anyway.

We presently have about twenty pounds of dry beans under our bed.

Dry beans are supposedly good for 2-3 years, and no longer nutritious after 5. I can tell you from experience, one time I made a black bean soup from dried beans, and it was inedible. I boiled those beans for like 8 hours and they never softened up. Dry beans do too go bad!

My food hoarders universally do not believe in expiration dates or germ theory. They will defend as “still perfectly good” the most sketchy foods you’ve ever seen: things that blew up and spattered all over the place, things that come out runny or chunky, things that smell like they are fermenting, even things with visible mold.

My record for oldest food found in a refrigerator was something that had been expired for 16 years.

If you are scoffing at that or wanting to know what it was, congratulations, you are a food safety skeptic.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but I would ask you: is your digestion sometimes a bit dodgy? Is anyone in your household, including pets, prone to bouts of illness?

I am blessed, myself, with a cast iron stomach. I’d like to keep it that way, and that’s why I emphasize fresh foods in my own diet.

I cheat a little. I put my husband in charge of throwing away any food that is too old. He has zero patience with the whole concept of “it’s still good” or “it was expensive” and will just chuck stuff. When in doubt, throw it out!

I’m not suggesting that anybody throw anything away, unless of course it might make you sick.

What I am suggesting is that you start cooking up and eating the oldest stuff from your pantry now.

You can keep replacing it with new, fresh foods if it makes you feel better. If you really want to try to keep a year’s worth of food on hand at all times, sure, knock yourself out. Just please do yourself the favor of getting your money’s worth and using standard rotation.

Or if you don’t feel like socializing in the new normal, feed the old stuff to your guests and visitors!