How Your Pantry Looks Says a Lot About Who You Are

The performative pantry must be stopped.

Dorte Fjalland / Getty Images

If you’ve ever watched a home makeover show, you’re probably familiar with the now-ubiquitous aesthetic of an organized kitchen in the 2020s. There’s open shelving, with plates and bowls neatly stacked and no cabinet doors to hide behind. There’s usually a vast, gleaming, kitchen island. And every single food item, from pasta to spices, has been removed from its original packaging and put into matching, labeled, clear containers, usually plastic.

On social media, organization devotees go even further. Instagram users show off the fridges that they’ve stocked with snacks placed into yet more clear plastic bins. Freezer restocks — a micro-genre of TikTok that I’ve become extremely familiar with — show people who split their entire freezer into different bins for various shapes and flavors of ice, meticulously restocking cubes studded with flowers or made out of juice or coffee. They’re all aspects of what I’ve come to think of as a performative pantry: a system of organizing your food that prioritizes meticulous neatness over the actual food.

The performative pantry aesthetic assumes certain truths about your life. First, that you have a relatively large kitchen and fridge, and I can say from experience that those plastic bins end up eating a lot of space. Second, that you have the time, funds, and energy to remove all the food you eat and the ingredients for your meals from the packaging that they came in and into individual containers. And third, that you basically have the same grocery list every single time.

The performative pantry is a rigid one. When aesthetics are more important than ingredients, it limits what foods you’re going to pick up and eat. After all, if you have a special container for farfalle, are you really going to re-label it every week for a different pasta shape? Probably not.

But the principle behind this kind of organization that really bugs me is that it’s so clearly meant to be looked at and not to be used. Sure, having everything decanted into gleaming containers means that it’s easy to find. But the emphasis is much more on how a certain food looks than if it’s useful, or flavorful, or fresh. Decanting your groceries works for certain items that are prone to bug infestation, like flour, or benefit from an airtight container to keep them from going stale, like coffee beans.

“Pantries aren’t just there to look good. They’re there to be used.”

Margaret Eby

But you don’t need to do that for everything. The container they came in works perfectly well, as Jaya Saxena points out in her excellent Eater story against decanting, and accumulating more plastic containers to do all that organization and decanting ultimately contributes to kitchen waste. Plus, if I may: It’s boring. In 20 years, I think we’ll look back on this era of clear-container-everything and think, “Woof, what a 2020s thing.” Pantries aren’t just there to look good. They’re there to be used, and things that you regularly use often look that way.

I’m all for having a system of organization. My house has many quart containers marked with blue tape: leftover pesto, mole sauce, a big thing of garlic I minced in the food processor. I love an OXO pop-top container as much as the next person. But my kitchen isn’t a professional space. I don’t have a walk-in, like a restaurant, and I don’t want it to be a space that I’m afraid to get messy in, lest I disturb the look of it.

Cooking is inherently a messy endeavor. You can be neat, sure, and you can clean up as you go. But you can’t make a lasagna without squishing a few tomatoes, as the saying doesn’t exactly go, and if your kitchen is so spotless and meticulously organized that you don’t want to mess up the counter or deplete the canister of sugar by using it, it’s the same problem as having a gorgeous new notebook that you can’t bear to write in.

“It’s fine if your pantry doesn’t look like a Kardashian pantry.”

Margaret Eby

It’s fine if that’s the kind of kitchen that you want. But the astounding prevalence of these performative pantries — on social media, in celebrity kitchens, in home organization shows, and on television — feels like it’s shaming and stifling people who don’t live that way. I’m not saying that everyone feels the need to have their own freezer ice cube emporium. But the subtle pressure of the performative pantry is real. Widely-imitated aesthetics like these turn into behavioral norms that are subsequently policed. We have enough policing in our lives.

It’s fine if your pantry doesn’t look like a Kardashian pantry. It’s regular to keep your pasta in the cardboard box it came in. Kitchens are at the intersection of lifestyle spaces and utilitarian ones. It makes sense to be invested in how it looks, as well as how it functions. But don’t let the former overshadow the latter.

Read the original article on Food & Wine.