RBOFood

• Went through the pantry and took out everything that had expired in 2023 and put it on the kitchen island.  The kitchen island is pretty crowded, including graham crackers that I swear we bought a few months ago.  No wonder they were on sale.
• I overbuy because of money insecurity problems growing up and I like having a full pantry.
• Last night I dreamed that a huge number of people came over and I had to feed them from what we had on hand, and I was able to!  And thinking on it, it was with food we actually have on hand IRL.
• I think we have a couple of weeks where we’re just going to eat expired pantry food (plus whatever it takes to turn said food into meals– ex. NOT-expired pasta/rice/chicken/mixed veggies).
• I often forget we have pantry sauces and tend to go to the freezer first when we need a quick weeknight meal that we didn’t buy the ingredients for that week.
• I don’t have a problem with expired pantry food– it’s always been still good and everything online says that it’s the “best buy” date, not the “dangerous to eat” date.  Generally it’s still fine, though the store-brand fizzy water in the large containers does go flat if we don’t drink it soon enough.  (Other fizzy water– still fizzy!)  I’m much more cautious about refrigerator food.  But I try to rotate it out– there’s no point in it taking up space for years at a time.
• Sometimes we get stuff we don’t want or can’t eat (red dye, yeast extract, etc.) and I try to donate those before they go bad.  But I don’t always succeed.  That makes me feel guilty.  I really should just leave stuff for students to take (and did that with a flat of premium cat food that our cat didn’t like), but I don’t want to do that after said food has expired.
• DH is still calorie counting, DC1 is off to college, and DC2 is between growth spurts.  So we’re just not eating much.  It is really hard to adjust to DC1 being gone, especially when nobody else is taking up the slack.  I need to get used to either planning fewer meals or making less at each meal.  Or going back to using the freezer, but lately the freezer has been stuffed so we would need to eat it down first.
• At the same time, we’re trying to eat more fruits and vegetables.  This is difficult because fruits and vegetables go bad or take up freezer space!  #richpeopleproblems

How do you deal with expired food?  Do you stockpile?  What kinds of things do you do during the new year?