Food storage fail... Re-thinking shelves.

[ak474u]

So, we're really busy around here, and rotate food before expirations etc. But, we had a seriously gross, as in disgusting fail the other day. Since we live in an apartment, we have good, but not great storage. We have a pantry, that is pretty well organized, and a large laundry room off the kitchen, about 8x7' that houses washer, dryer, small chest freezer, and a 6x3x18" deep restaurant wire storage rack. The restaurant rack has been dry goods storage for things we use regularly, and is secondary to bulk bucket storage. We generally store crackers, flour, sugar, granola bars, and all the stuff that my son eats for breakfast like cereals etc. Lets go back in time about a year..... Wife had vacation,cut lots of coupons, and we stocked up pretty heavily on fruit bars, granola, crackers, cereals etc. with a decent shelf life, that my son would eat, as well as boxed rice dinners for sides with our regular meals, also keeping in mind easy prep time if SHTF we could use these first. The problem is, we got so much, that it got disorderly, some things got opened (cereals mostly) and we bought a few more groceries that found a vacant spot on the shelf. Fast forward to 2 days ago... I walked into the laundry room, and noticed there were funny looking yellow worms on the ceiling. I looked briefly for the source after killing the little devils, and went off to work. Came home, and there were more little yellow worms on the wall. I set into checking packages, throwing out the now expired goodies we didn't even know we had, because we piled new stuff on top of it. HUGE WASTE, but still no creepy little bugs to be found. I eventually found the source. I had set out a bag of guajillo peppers for our cleaning lady to take home since she taught me how to make carne guisada pork, AWESOME BTW, I had overbought the dried peppers, so I set them out for her to take home since they make it frequently at her house. Well, she apparently didn't read the note, and put them in the shelves, where a swarm of creepy worms, and flies were now residing. Ewwww! Up to now, I've thrown out 4 trash bags of expired, and damaged food. Did you now these little monsters can get into a box of cereal even if it is rolled down and clipped with a clothespin? I do.


Obviously, this happens sometimes, a bag of flour gets bugs whatever, but it's my fault. We're buying a house in January, so I'm going to get to build my storage shelving to my spec instead of making do. I think I have a solution... Shelving no more than a cereal box deep front to back to prevent overloading, and the chaos that is my secondary pantry, full of expired food that I really really wanted to eat, and didn't just buy on a whim. I'd estimate I threw out $100 worth of expired, and unnecessarily damaged goods due to negligent storage practices. Anybody else come up with a method that allows you to maximize space, but not find prehistoric food that you didn't even remember having?

[robsdak]

shelfreliance.com

try looking at this site it might give you some ideas. i have used them before and i liked the ones for the canned goods. just a glance and i could see what was needed from the store.

[Katrina]

When we redid the pantry I went with the Rubbermaid metalwire kitchen shelving but used the 12" shoe racks on one wall for the canned goods. We put the vertical strips for the shelf supports right into the studs every 16". They now hold a lot of cans, on their sides but we can see ALL the cans.

[Gunfixr]

While we do have a house, it is not a particularly large one, so we are running under much the same problem, no real space to put it.

Every so often, I just have to pull it all out and redo it. However, I put the newest stuff, which won't be used for awhile, in boxes which are stacked. They are packed and stacked by date, so simply opening the top box gives you the oldest "stored" stuff. Really, the oldest is on the shelves to be used first, with the next oldest in the top box once the shelf is empty, etc. As we get new, every so often I have to pull it all out, to put the newest in a box on the bottom, after taking the oldest out and putting it on the shelves.

This was done after our disaster several years ago. A particularly cold winter drove some mice into the house. By the time we discovered them, they had a large population, and we had a problem. They destroyed quite a bit of food.
I got them all, but it took awhile of seriously active hunting. Ironically, I was actively killing mice while my wife was feeding a pet rat.