Money Crashers: The Pantry Challenge

As Marie Kondo's new show about the joy of tidying up your home attracts more and more buzz, I thought it might be time to say a few words about an often-overlooked part of the home: the pantry. By this I mean not just a single closet devoted to food storage, but all the places in the home where food is kept, including the cupboards, freezer, and fridge.

Many of us have stuff lurking in these spaces that we don't even know is there. Four bags of lentil flour (hey, it was on sale). A half-empty sleeve of saltines. Jars of jam we're sure we never bought. We don't know what to do with this stuff, so usually it just makes its way to the back of the shelf and gets buried there. If we ever go to the effort of unearthing it, we figure the only thing to do is take a leaf out of Marie's book, thank it for its service, and toss it.

But Jessica Fisher, of the cooking site Good Cheap Eats, has a radical alternative idea: Eat it.

Fisher's "pantry challenge" is a simple idea: For anywhere from one week to one month, eat only what's in your pantry. Aside from a small allowance each week for fresh produce or milk, you don't buy any groceries. Instead, you actually figure out ways to use all that lentil flour and jam stores in the back of your pantry. The only things you're allowed to throw away are things that have actually gone bad. Everything else—everything—gets used up. When the challenge is over, you'll be able to see the back of your fridge again, and you'll have plenty of money in your wallet to restock it. And in the process, you'll learn about what you like (hey, turns out that lentil flour is actually pretty useful!) and what you don't (blech, plum jam is just not your thing), so you'll know what to restock it with.

In my latest Money Crashers article, I discuss all the ins and outs of the pantry challenge: its various benefits, how to carry it out, and what recipes can be most useful for using up all those bits and scraps you haven't been thinking of as food. You can read all about it here: The Pantry Challenge – What It Is & How to Save Money With It.

Of course, I realize there are probably a lot of furloughed government workers out there who are doing this right now out of sheer necessity. For them, checking out the recipes and tips in my article, and on Fisher's site, could be a way to stretch their pantry stores a little farther before having to resort to the food bank. And for everyone else who's lucky enough to still have a job that pays, it's a way to clean out the pantry for the new year and save a little cash at the same time.