My Favorite Hoarder, or How Not to Stock a Pantry

One of my favorite shows is A&E's Hoarders. I know they have problems and you may argue it is wrong of me to be so voyeuristic with the mentally damaged, but I cannot look away. Mind you, I watch as I do laundry, dust, or de-clutter. It is difficult to just sit and watch unless you tidy up a bit at the same time. Just try it, I bet you can't. As I watch, I look around and see in my own home a pile of laundry that needs to be washed immediately, an overflowing box of newspaper that has to be taken to the car for recycling the next day, or at the very least a smudge on a mirror.

I re-watched my all time favorite the other day. Jill had an entire house stuffed full of expired and rotting food. She held onto a bookcase full of boxes of chicken broth that had expired three years previously. She said it wasn't bad yet because it wasn't puffy. Not being puffy was the excuse she also used for wanting to hold onto the green meat in the freezer, and the eight month past the date yogurt in the refrigerator. At one time the woman had gone through a period when she was poor and hungry. This affected her deeply and she reached a point where she bargain shopped for food, bought way more than she could possibly use, and stored it everywhere.

My favorite scene was when the man in the hazmat suit was shoveling a blackened rotting pumpkin off her living room floor and she stopped him. She said it had been the most beautiful pumpkin ever when it was alive, then she plunged her hand into the rotting goo to save a few seeds to plant. Wow!

With all this talk of stocking a pantry, it is important to purchase only items you would use anyway. Purchase the quantity of items you will be able to use before they expire. If you only eat canned tuna once or twice a year, don't bother to buy more than a few cans when they go on sale, and don't go overboard with perishables either. The point of having a pantry is to have good food available when you need it, not to buy it cheap and then throw it away.