It’s Pantry Purge time!
Dialing up your health to the next level necessitates a complete pantry purge. This isn’t just to get rid of out-of-date food – it’s also to figure out how you can replace your usual purchases with healthier choices. Are you ready?
I recommend that you carve out the time and plan to do it all in one go. If you just do one shelf at a time, the job will never get properly done. Besides there is nothing so satisfying as a complete makeover with the resulting knowledge that everything sitting on your newly gleaming shelves is good for your body.
It’s astounding how so much of what we buy contains additives, preservatives, sugar (in it’s many hidden forms), salt, thickeners, stabilizers – and I could go on and on. It’s also confusing for the average working mom like me who just wants to be able to do a quick monthly shop and trust that I won’t be harming my or my family’s health. But, the truth is that the standard American diet (and what we often see in mainstream grocery stores), is making us sick. Yes – cancer, diabetes and heart disease rates are rising, and we can hugely mitigate this by changing what we choose to toss into our grocery carts.
Here’s what I suggest:
1. Give yourself a good 2-3 hour window for the job. This will depend on the size of your pantry, but make sure that you are factoring in time to get everything out, and clean your pantry from top to bottom. Don’t start this task until you know that you will be undisturbed by hungry kids or pressing phone calls.
2. Put on your favorite playlist!
3. Take every single thing out of your pantry and place it on your kitchen table, island, and/or counter.
4. Using a hot vinegar spray (microwave 2 cups of white vinegar for 1.5 minutes and pour into sprayer bottle), clean down all your pantry shelves, cabinets etc.
5. Sort your food and staples into categories: flour, sugars/sweeteners, condiments, pasta/rice, cereal/granola etc
6. Pick up each and every item and check the following:
a) Is it past it’s use-by date? If there is no use-by date, check out my When Should I Toss It? Article.
b) Have I used it within the last year or was it an impulse purchase that I probably won’t use again?
c) Does it contain ingredients that look like they could be stabilizers, hidden sugars, preservatives etc (numbers and odd sounding chemical names could be a giveaway), that wouldn’t be Shunned-by-Sophie!
7. Make a list of all the items that you need to replace your unhealthy items with.
8. Clean the bottles and jars with vinegar spray and replace all the items.
Okay, now you are done. The whole point of the purge is NOT to toss a bunch of expensive food away. If you’ve been using it for years, a few more weeks won’t kill you – so I recommend finishing up what you have. But the goal of the purge is for you to have a clear plan and shopping list of how you can best re-stock your pantry as the need arises for each item to be replaced.
Finally, I’m sure there will be a few questions for me, so please post them as a comment on Facebook (not a personal message), and I will attempt to answer as many as I can.
Enjoy – this is a very therapeutic exercise!
