story by Donna Hecker & photography by Talitha Schroeder

All my life I’ve been in love with food. When I wasn’t eating, I thought about eating. When I wasn’t cooking, I thought about cooking. I read about food and talked about food. My husband jokes that I’m the only person he knows who window shops in the grocery store.

But somewhere along the way, I came to embody the old saying about one’s eyes being bigger than one’s stomach. I had to buy something from every stall at the farmers market. Winter greens, spring asparagus, summer corn – no matter the season, I wanted it all! Shopping for groceries, I only got the best. I rationalized the expense because it was food, it was nourishment, we deserved to eat well.

Other people might indulge in mani-pedis, streaming services, or shopping sprees. My extravagances were Irish butter, cream-top milk, artisan breads, and pastured meats. A lot of attention went into the food I was buying but somehow, once I got home, I could never make use of it all.

Not surprisingly, every week a significant portion of that beautiful food ended up in the garbage can. According to the USDA, 30-40% of the food in the US is wasted, most of it at the household level. And I was guilty as hell.

So when my friend Lynn announced a January Pantry Challenge, eating only what was on hand when the New Year struck, I told her to sign me up.

Lynn Tomlinson Aubrey is an assistant chief with the Frankfort, Ky. police department. She’s also a hobby farmer who lives on several acres in rural Franklin county. Over the years, Lynn’s land has supported goats, sheep, chickens and a milk cow or two.

While I relied on the labor of others to provide me with food, Lynn was determined to grow her own. She has amassed an impressive store of home-canned fruits and vegetables from her garden, yet she felt the need to go one step farther. Hence the pantry challenge.

A major reason for doing this was my need to feel prepared to take care of my family. That's a significant reason why I garden, preserve food, cook from scratch, and shop locally as much as possible. But I had never really put it to the test. This was a way for me to see if I really would be prepared should an emergency arise. Not in a prepper sense, but in the sense of an illness, job loss, or weather emergency. I'm learning where my weak spots are so I can hopefully fix them.

The challenge quickly grew to include more than a dozen members. There are no hard and fast rules – just an admonition to do our best and be generous with grace and mutual support. Each person’s challenge reflected her own goals and situation.

We’re full-time workers and retirees, married and single, intuitive cooks and long-range meal planners. One of us makes do with a 10-cubic-foot refrigerator/freezer combo, others have multiple deep freezes and commercial grade reach-ins. We’re learning together how to love leftovers and use ingredients to create more than one meal; we’re getting comfortable with “flexible” expiration dates.

The tips have been flying furiously. Flaxseed meal as an egg substitute. Baked goods made with sourdough discard. A use for zucchini frozen last summer and freshly unearthed. Poor man’s beef stew made with hamburger. A dozen variations on nail soup.

And now that we’re on the downhill slide, deeper lessons are emerging, too. Lessons in creativity, self-reliance, camaraderie, and thrift. For me, it’s been an opportunity to recalibrate my relationship with a lifelong passion. To realize that it’s not enough to select food with care, cook it with attention, eat it with relish. To learn that doing justice to food, and the farmers who produce it, also means not wasting it.

When life was less abundant and times were harder, there was a popular saying: use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. Sustainability never goes out of style.

Getting By: The Pantry Challenge

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