Food Waste Friday: The Pantry Moth Edition

No new picture this time because I don't think I could fit it all in the frame.  We've had pantry moth issues in the past, and despite the heart-felt advice of a pantry moth-hating friend, I just didn't deal with it.  In my defense, this is what we were dealing with:

Yeah.  I originally posted this picture July, 2010

I'd been eating my way through that stash, so it was about half as much as you see there, but we also bought like ten boxes of Rice-a-Roni about six months back because I made some for bf one night and he liked it.  He then panicked that we'd run out, we stocked up, and he never ate it because it's too much work to prepare.  Sigh, I love him, but grrr.

So that happened.

All totaled, in the past month I've thrown away:

• 10 boxes Rice-a-Roni in a variety of flavors
• 5 boxes of Pasta Roni
• 6 cans of Campbell's soup that expired in 2009 and that bf brought with him when we moved into this apartment
• 4 freaky pre-fab meals that bf's mother bought for him at Ocean State Job Lot that he never expressed an interest in eating, but refused to get rid of for some reason
• Some cornmeal
• 1/2 bag of split peas

So that's a lot of food waste, and I would have loved to have donated it to the food pantry instead of just throwing it away, but it was either super expired, or potentially infested.  I feel sick about throwing away all that money, but I certainly wasn't going to eat that food--though I'd been using the noodles from the Pasta Roni for other things and throwing away the powdered flavor packet.  It's a bit cathartic.

The bugmen came on Wednesday and hopefully secured the place against any further infestation, the tainted food is gone, and next time bf wants to buy 10 boxes of Rice-a-Roni, I'll remind him that he hates to prepare it, and that I hate to throw away food.