Opinion

Anita Robinson: Ancient soup tin donation spurs me into a cupboard clear out

 Anita Robinson is spring cleaning 
 Anita Robinson is spring cleaning   Anita Robinson is spring cleaning 

I’m spring-cleaning. Yes, I know we’re in the teeth of Hallowe’en, but when did I ever do anything in time?

I’m turning out my kitchen store-cupboards, a job I’ve successfully postponed since, not last Christmas, nor maybe the one before, or truth be told, probably much longer.

You know how it is – I buy stuff, put it away, buy more stuff because I’ve forgotten I have the original stuff which has got pushed to the back of the cupboard by the new stuff so I can’t see it unless I get down on my hands and knees which is not a good idea because I can’t get up again unless I creep around looking for a substantial piece of furniture that won’t fall over if I lever myself upright by holding on to it.

Yes, I know what organised people do. They draw the older stuff to the front and put the newer stuff to the back, rather than squish things in at random wherever there’s room and then jam the door shut.

Anyway, I’m galvanized by guilt into this unaccustomed activity by a press report that a 46-year-old tin of Heinz soup has been donated to a Welsh food bank, complete with its 10d (old money) price-sticker still attached. I’ve a terrible feeling I might match it.

You know how it is – you lay in supplies for people coming to stay, stuff you may not eat yourself but feel you ought to have in the house ‘in case’. Things like shredless marmalade, muesli and porridge oats, then discover the visitors want nothing in the morning but orange juice and black coffee; trifle sponges and meringue nests for quick desserts, (they don’t eat dessert); stuffed olives, seaweed crackers, vegetable crisps and pistachios for ‘nibbles’ (which they barely touch) and four kinds of cheese, (they’ve cut back on dairy.)

To compound the wasteful felony, I have a box-file of recipes ripped enthusiastically out of magazines with a view to trying – sometime. I buy the ingredients, but busyness or bone-idleness intervenes and the tin of artichoke hearts or jar of juniper berries is never opened. Worse, are the ‘once, but never again’ experiments which take too much time and trouble and require half a teaspoon, a pinch or a scattering of some exotic condiment that reproaches me every time I open the cupboard door.

Particularly shame-making is my seasonings shelf – a phalanx of elderly little tins, bottles and packets (many duplicated) of fossilised herbs and spices exhausted by age. What was I ever going to cook that required Baharat Blend, ‘an Arabic mix of nine spices including rose petals and mint’? Then there’s the stuff one impulse buys at Saturday markets – jams, chutneys, flavoured oils, all of unknown vintage and forgotten origin.

As my energetic evisceration of cupboards gathers momentum, I’m fast running out of table and worktop space to accommodate this avalanche of food stuffs. It’s like Tesco’s after a ram-raid in here, with spilt lentils, soup-mix and rice grains from half-used packets crunching underfoot. Time for a cuppa, a sit-down and a period of rueful reflection. Here is my Litany of Kitchen Cupboard Shame. 19 items (so far) ranging in ‘best before’ dates from February ’08 to October ’15, including plain flour, porridge oats, noodles, pasta, soup, semolina, tinned tomatoes, chickpeas, meringue nests (two packets, Dec ’11 and April ’13) and gravy granules. The Loving Spouse used to complain that I never made gravy. I did. Just once.

Now I’m faced with the problem of disposing of this random harvest – a task made considerably more onerous, time-consuming and complicated by the recent introduction in my area of the brown food caddy, a receptacle the size and proportion of a child’s seaside pail, into which all food waste must be put, in small biodegradable bags to be collected weekly.

I’ve shifted the lot into the futility room. My own personal food mountain. It’ll take me till Christmas to get rid of it all. And the terrible waste – oh, I do feel bad about that.

I hear my mother’s voice – “You’ll follow the crows for it one day.”