Quick story from yesterday…….I was at work going through an empty desk that we use for storage and I came across some stuff that should have been thrown out a long time ago (like 18mos ago).  Well, I pull it out and low and behold buried underneath is an unopened box of Nabisco 100 calorie pack chocolate chip cookies!  To fill you in- monthly I buy snacks for the team when we have our crazy month-end week.  So, likely when they didn’t get eaten someone put them in the drawer for the next time and then they were promptly forgotten! So, I check the expiration date on the box……June 14, 2010……yummy!  So, being that it was July 1st, I promptly put them in the trash – yes, I should have recycled the box -call me lazy!

So, what is the point of this story other than to share a gross food story?  It got me thinking about these cookies that had to have been purchased sometime in 2009 (if not earlier) and that they had enough preservative in them to last until this past June……….I’m pretty grossed out thinking that I used to eat food like that all of the time!  Yeah, I’m giving it to my kids too………great….

I was driving home yesterday thinking about the cookie discovery and thinking about what I might have at home that fits in this “highly preserved” category that I just never thought about before.  It reminded me of a comment I heard about clean eating…….”if you are eating clean, then you are rarely in your pantry.  You would eat mostly from the refrigerator”.   These preservative heavy foods are usually the ones that live in our pantries.   Kind of like shopping the perimeter of the grocery store….its all refrigerated!

I think I need to take some inventory to see how we’re doing in our house with the pantry.   So, its only appropriate that I have full disclosure with you all……….my pantry:

 

I’m going to give myself a C+, maybe a B- on our pantry.  Yes – I know you saw the Easy Mac – my kids love mac ‘n cheese and quite frankly on the weekends, sometimes it makes for a quick easy lunch for them.  To further my defense of still serving this ”food” – it usually becomes a side and is served with some veggie too.  Okay….and the Cheerios…..I seem to have an evening addiction to those that I need to kick – I’ve been having a tiny bowl of them with cut up strawberries – hey at least I’m eating them with fruit! :)

The rest of the contents are lots ‘o spices (see the shelf on the left), protein bars, almonds, soy nuts, rice, couscous, quinoa, onions, sweet potatoes- all dry goods that would normally be in a pantry and not the refrigerator.  I did actually throw out a bunch of sugary type of things awhile back when I determined that I was really committed to this clean eating – like a tub of actual sugar, light and dark corn syrup (used for pecan pies), crisco and a few other mostly baking items.

I challenge you to review your pantry…….do you get most of your food from the pantry or from the refrigerator?