It’s not news that some people dine out more than they eat in. But one woman’s family is so methodical about all the food it consumes that a daily system keeps things in check.
A TikTok user named @peeliesnpetals recently posted a video in response to another user’s video, which inquired as to why she stores so much food.
The first thing acknowledged by the woman, who films in a room surrounded by myriad shelves of canned food items, is that her family rarely goes out to eat.
“We eat out maybe six to eight times a year,” she said. “That’s once every two months. We eat all three meals in our house every day.”
The woman said she makes many foods from scratch, including bread and pasta noodles.
“I also run my household like a business,” she added. “This is so I can make sure our dollar is stretching as much as possible; that we’re reducing our carbon footprint on the earth by growing and preserving our own foods—which means I need to preserve enough food to take me from one growth season to the next growth season.”
She takes the video’s 3.2 million viewers on a tour of her large pantry, starting with canned peaches that are two years old and were originally purchased by a farmer as part of a $20 bushel. She bought two bushels’ worth and preserved enough for the two-year timespan.
“I keep an Excel spreadsheet of what we use every day in all of our meals, how many jars I can and how many we use—and I adjust that year to year so I’m growing appropriately, what we need for the following year,” she said.
Canned goods include corn, carrots, green beans, squash and potatoes. One jar of each food is consumed per week on average, she explained, so 52 jars of each food is required throughout a calendar year.
She used the example of buying 60 pounds’ worth of asparagus at $1 per pound.
“It’s all just a math game,” she said.
The video was met with many comments of support toward what has become a less common act of food preservation.
“People will call this a luxury, not realizing it’s actually a luxury to eat out all the time & buy everything from the store,” one user commented.
Another user said, “It’s crazy to think in like 50 years we have forgotten how we used to store our food.” The woman replied by saying there is “a super disconnect” between humans and their food that occurred rather quickly.
Another user commented, saying she has been canning for over 20 years and makes her own bread with four ingredients.
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