Compulsive, much?

I took a vacation day today to go to an appointment and to renew my health card and drivers’ license. Thankfully, it all happened with remarkable efficiency, so I spent much of the day doing something that desperately needed to be done: organizing my cupboards.

Since I started doing a lot of cooking for myself, I’ve been doing a lot of grocery shopping, and storing things wherever there was space, and then, when not able to find (all of) them, I would go out and buy some more. The result? Eleven cans of chickpeas. Ten cans of black beans. Three six-packs of single-serving applesauce. Three bags of engevita yeast. Three bags of chocolate chips. Cans of mushrooms I didn't even know I had. Stuff I don’t even know how I’m going to use. On and on. Witness:

(Ignore the top shelf - I've got to do some rearranging there, so it'll look more impressive in a few days, trust me. Also, those cans on the third shelf? They are stacked three cans deep! The photo is cropped so you can also see the large number of bananas I have on hand, in various stages of ripening.)

This is stupid, right? It doesn’t make sense to have so much stuff when there’s no way that I can use it all any time soon. There is no black bean-chickpea-hoisin-chutney recipe that’s going to fix this.

At times like these, it would be really easy to blame my parents. So that’s exactly what I’m going to do! You see, I grew up in a hoarding household. We lived in the country (a scant two kilometres out of town), and frequent trips to the store were considered wasteful (in retrospect, this was environmentally friendly, at least). But more than that, my father had convinced all of us that another economic depression was imminent, and that we should stock up on necessities for the inevitable crashing of our economy. (If ever there was a reason to be a morose adolescent, that was it!) We had a big pantry with all sorts of storage space for every non-perishable item you could imagine. This is normal to me!

Today, I have my own reasons for stocking up. I like to buy organic, specialty products that are available only at a few locations within the city. None are in my neighbourhood, and are in fact out of my way. So I make the occasional car trip and load up.

But the reality is, even if everything I wanted were at the corner store, I’d still want to have an overstocked pantry. I'd feel ... naked or something without one. Perhaps in my next lifetime I’ll be a squirrel?