April – Clean Thyself #30DaysofGOOD Challenge

When I was still working from home the house was much cleaner than it is now. I’ll admit, spending 10-12 hours outside of the house, and then coming home… the first thing on my mind isn’t to organize the pantry. But it’s time for some spring cleaning, and conveniently GOOD is doing a 30-Day Spring Cleaning Challenge in April.

The Challenge for Sunday was “Clean your Pantry” and in the case of the Good Challenge, it’s not limited to just cleaning in the traditional sense, but cleaning up and being aware of your impact on the environment and fellow living things. Since I’m already living the challenge they set out for Monday – Eat less meat (or in my case, no meat, ever) I took an hour or two yesterday to clean and organize our pantry.

This is what it looked like before:

This is what it looked like after:

Maybe it doesn’t look different to you, but for me it makes a huge difference. Everything I need for baking is on the top shelf, which means no more bending down to lift flour or the like. Next is my over abundant collection of tea, with spices, and sweeteners. Next shelf is non-perishables, last is carb heavy products we don’t really eat often.

The Good idea of a pantry clean up is to be aware of the carbon footprint of your food.

“A general rule of thumb is the less processed a food is, the less damage its production causes to the environment. According to a 2011 study from the Environmental Working Group, some of the best foods to keep around include lentils, beans, and nuts. When it comes to grains, choose ones high in protein, such as brown rice or quinoa.” (more)

We’re all about the lentils, beans and nuts. I’ve definitely been focusing a lot on supporting locally produced/harvested products, (we even picked up wild rice from the last Dufferin Grove Farmers Market) but our pantry was not immune to convenience foods, but it’s definitely more organized now.