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?