Grr, ranty rantiness ahead

[selenay]

The company IT division is doing a competition to gather stuff for the food bank, so my department has been turned into a team in this thing and we're being encouraged to bring as much in as we can. Fair enough, I have no problem with this. I've got friends who have relied on food banks at times in their lives and I firmly believe in giving back when I'm able.

We didn't get told about this until Monday.

Yesterday, a co-worker sent out a chirpy little email about how sad the amount we'd collected so far was, and exhorting us to bring in 'a few cans and jars from the cupboard' today to make our stack look better.

Which is fine for people who actually have a stash of cans and jars in their cupboard, but I don't. So I didn't bring anything in, because I'm doing my regular grocery shopping later in the week and I'll buy some stuff then. We've got until the end of next week to collect stuff. This will be fine, right?


My co-irker is unhappy with me. Apparently everyone has cans and jars sitting in their cupboard, waiting to go.

Co-irker: What about soup?
Me: I don't like canned soup, so no.
Co-irker: Nobody doesn't like canned soup. Really, you don't keep cans of stuff around?
Me: I rarely cook with canned stuff, so no. I buy it when I need it. And I finished my last can of tuna earlier this week, so I don't even have that right now.
Co-irker: But what about jars? You must have a couple of jars of pasta sauce! Or peanut butter, you must have that!
Me: I make and freeze pasta sauce, so I don't keep the jarred stuff around. And I really don't like peanut butter. I have a jar of super expensive pesto sauce, I think, that I have no intention of giving away. That's pretty much it.
Co-irker: *horrifed face* But everyone likes peanut butter!
Me: ...
Co-irker: Didn't you have, like, a bag of flour or two around to give? Or pasta? Or a bag of sugar?
Me: I have an open bag of flour. And a spare bag of wholewheat bread flour, which I'm pretty sure the food bank won't want. My pasta has all been decanted into a jar. As has my sugar, which I don't keep a spare of because it goes hard and yucky by the time I need it. I do not have loads and loads of stuff sitting around in my cupboards, just in case I need it.
Co-irker: You are so weird. Like, how do you *eat*?
Me: *headdesk*

I am not a happy kitten right now. This has made me so grumpy. The same co-worker thought it was insane that I don't keep a bunch of ready meals in my freezer that I can just bung in the microwave if I need a quick meal.

I do keep ready meals in my freezer. It's just that they're things I've made and frozen, and therefore they can't be just 'stuck in a micro for five minutes'. They need to be defrosted and reheated properly. Which is easy to do if I remember to take them out of the freezer the night before, less easy if my brain deserts me.

The rampant disbelief about the state of my cupboards just grated on me so much today. So much. Why is it so weird that most of what I eat is not based around cans and jars?

Comments

[nomelon]

I am right there with you. It secretly INFURIATES me when people judge me for what I cook/eat because they can't get their head around how it's fresh and homemade and unadulterated and I wouldn't have it any other way. Like I'm the one who needs judged.

Hold your head high.

[selenay]

It's not that I never, ever, ever buy cans. There are a few things that I do use as ingredients, such as canned tomatoes or some specific types of canned beans, where the effort of making from scratch adds hours to cooking that I don't judge worth it. I don't keep them around in hopes that I *might* use them within the next two months, though, and most of the "tip out of can, it's ready to eat" stuff is pretty much my most hated foods ever.

Except tuna. I totally dig tuna.

Judging me because I prefer to eat as much fresh homemade food as possible just grated me :-(

[loki_of_sassgaard]

Peanut butter's fuckin gross.

Yeah, the whole concept of doing a $300 shopping trip is so weird to me. Half of it winds up going to waste because by the time you get to it, it's gone off. I'll spend about $20-40 a week on groceries when I do it my way, and the only reason it goes so high is because meat is getting out of hand. I actually do my shopping daily, so I know I'm buying only what I need. The exception to daily shopping is that it is cheaper to buy big bags of frozen chicken or the larger things of ground beef, so we always do have some of that sitting around, waiting to be used.

I do the same thing with my pasta, and keep it all in a jar. And omg jarred, pre-made sauces are the worst. The only sauce I buy is plain, un-seasoned or adulterated-with tomato sauce, and some tomato paste, and I build up from there. If I want to make a cream-based sauce, I do it all myself. And I've had people do the same thing, come in and assume I was broke and starving because the cupboards weren't overflowing with tins of beans that were bought two years ago.


Your co-worker probably doesn't even realise how much money they waste by having food just lying around.

[selenay]

I do a weekly shop, but that's mainly because the store is so far out of my way that daily shopping would kill me. But I make a weekly plan of what meals I'll be eating and I build my shopping list from that, so I don't end up with wasted food. My bill is a bit higher than yours, because I live in Canada and food is always more expensive up here.

And I buy my veg and meat at the expensive boutique store, because the quality is so much better and they sell in quantities that I can reasonably eat without throwing half of it away :-)

The $300 massive shopping trip of doom is just not something I understand. As is keeping a shit ton of food around that I can't guarantee I'll actually eat. My freezer is pretty well-stocked with stuff I've made and batched up, but that's about it. The kind of stores that my colleagues apparently keep, makes me anxious. All that food to waste! Argh!

[topaz119]

The answer to this is: "I eat real, ACTUAL food, not pre-processed food-like sludge." Smile sweetly when you say it so she knows you're judging the fuck out of her.

[selenay]

*snicker* That's so tempting :-)

My co-irker couldn't understand why I don't keep canned soup around. How the hell do I make casseroles?

Um...

Please excuse me while I gag at most of the meals she cooks :-(

[escritoireazul]

Damn. Even if you did have a backstock of canned goods, giving you shit about not donating is crap, and then judging how you eat just adds to the levels of WTFery.

[selenay]

It was a whole level of WTFery that completely threw me. We work in IT, so none of us are dirt-poor, but not all of us can afford to just donate $50 of food without thinking, you know?

I'm used to some judgement about how I eat, because I am not a meat-every-day person and my appetite is small, but this was a level of judgy that made no sense at all.

[lilacsigil]

I cannot stand people who food judge! Unfortunately, I live in a very small town, so the contents of my shopping basket are everyone's business. I actually shop in a different town (50km away) to avoid the judging.

[selenay]

Oh, wow, I'd totally shop miles away in that case! I feel bad enough when I'm at the superstore and the cashier is side-eyeing the lack of meat and veg in basket. I always want to protest that I totally eat that stuff, I just buy it at a different store where the quality is better and the quantities can be smaller.

Except, that might not be the best plan, either...

[dirty_diana]

lol. I mean there are a couple of things I buy canned, but they are items that just aren't available fresh unless you live on an island. And a food drive probably wouldn't want my obscure ethnic food so I'd be in the same situation, guess we're both weird. :)

[selenay]

*fistbump* Heh, yeah, there's a few things I buy canned. I hate peeling tomatoes, so if I need them for a recipe, it's always a can. And if soaking and cooking beans/lentils doesn't add anything to a recipe (apart from around six hours of watching beans simmer), then I'll buy the canned version as a short-cut.

Plus, there's my super expensive specialty jarred pesto. And tuna.

But I'd run out of tuna this week (tragedy!) and I don't keep any of the rest around unless I specifically need it. Keeping stockpiles around 'just in case' drives me nuts.

[katlinel]

Your colleague is a right numpty, so "Aaaaggghhhh!" to them. Your store cupboard is impressively organised, and no, not everyone likes peanut butter - I loathe the sickly, slimy stuff the smell of which I find nauseating, and have since my first encounter with it as a small child. I don't have very many tins in my store cupboard either, but that's because we buy them and use them up, not least because we don't have a car and so we have to carry all our shopping on the bus. Tins are heavy. We buy fresh pasta sauce when we buy pasta sauce. (And my pasta sauce standby is a cheese sauce I make from flour, butter, milk and cheese, not a jar.)

I have two tins of consomme in the cupboard, but they are there for certain medical investigation reasons. (And possibly out of date or a few years old at least, which I don't care about as I'll still eat them on the needed day, when that comes, if I have to, but I wouldn't give them to a food bank.)

I would think it would be absolutely fine to buy the tins/jars/packets when you do your regular shop later in the week and hand them over then. Possibly other people are doing this too.

[selenay]

I have a fresh pasta sauce that I buy as a treat, because it's a creamy rose sauce that I don't even want to think about trying to make :-) The rest of the time, I make my own and freeze it. If I need cheese sauce, I make it. Jarred stuff is vile.

My co-irker is being incredibly competitive, as per usual, which has inspired some emails and conversations that I'm just ignoring now. Critiques of my shopping habits and eating habits are not welcome. She's the kind of person who honestly doesn't understand people who don't do things her way so I should have known that explaining why I don't have cans and jars just sitting around wasn't going to go well.

[jmathieson_fic]

Right there with you! I cook entirely from scratch as well, and the three things I reliably have a can of sitting at home are: tuna, baked beans (because I haven't learned to make them myself yet) and tomato soup, because it's my comfort food when I'm sick. I don't even have canned tomatoes, because I process and preserve my own tomatoes every year. I do always have a few cans for the food drive, though, because I live on a farm in the country, and there's no guarantee I'm going to be able to get out of the driveway to a store if we have a bad blizzard (also this area was out of power for almost a month during the last bad Ice Storm). So when baked beans go on sale, I always buy four cans at a time, and have a fully stocked emergency 'pantry' that would feed us for a month or more...

[selenay]

I used to keep a few cans of things around in case of storms, but then I realised it was all stuff that I wouldn't eat until Hell froze over and stopped doing it :-) I live on the outskirts of a small city, so the longest I'm likely to be unable to leave the house for is a couple of days. I've got more than enough food to last through that!

And I think our longest power cut was two days. Most canned stuff would require reheating and I have no safe way to do that without power where I live, so why bother?

I have no patience for peeling tomatoes, so canned toms are one of the things I do buy, but on an as needed basis. Tuna is my one canned staple because I'm British and I can make tuna into about a dozen different things with a couple of other store cupboard ingredients :-) It was just bad luck that I didn't have any last week.

It was on sale when I did my shopping. My tuna issue has been resolved :-D And the food bank has lots of tuna, too (with a few other things for variety).

[fyrdrakken]

This is a topic that keeps coming up in a lot of contexts lately. Americans (and apparently Canadians) have been trained over the last few decades to expect so much of their food to be prepared and packaged for them that cooking has become something of a lost art. If you aren't in the minority who grew up in a household that made a point of using actual ingredients and recipes, and if you haven't rediscovered cooking on your own as an adult or near-adult, then the prospect of not having anything on hand you can just dump in a pan on the stovetop or stick in the microwave for an easy meal sounds a bit daunting.

My mother came from a non-cooking household, while Dad came from a family of brilliant cooks. (Sadly, during my childhood all the cooking was delegated to Mom, who had a handful of dishes mainly learned from Dad and his mother. Dad wouldn't lower himself to any cooking not involving a grill until after he'd divorced Mom. A shame, since he's a brilliant cook.)