How Many Food Storage Containers Does a Woman Actually Need?

I once had a huge collection of food storage containers.

I loved the ideas behind those beautiful plastic bowls with their matching lids.

Oh, the possibilities!

The dream of carefully planned leftovers.

The hope of an easy meal on a crazy night because food would stay perfectly fresh in those gorgeous pieces of burpable plastic.

Once I started focusing on how to declutter my home, however, I began looking at my food storage containers in a different light.

First of all, I resented the pain when they fell on my head if I didn’t move out of the way quickly enough after opening the cabinet. Secondly, I generally only used the few that were in the front of the overfull cabinet. Thirdly, when you have more food storage containers that you actually need, there’s no need to rotate them.

Meaning . . . you can fill more and more containers without ever having to empty any. And in my world, that meant my fridge turned into a science lab.

Eventually, I realized that I only needed enough food storage containers to hold the amount of food we could actually eat before it went bad.

Realizing this gave me decluttering boundaries that helped me purge my kitchen cabinets.

Now, we run out of containers. While that never used to happen, it’s actually a good thing. If I open the cabinet to grab a container and there are none, I am forced to realize that my fridge likely holds containers of things that are no longer edible.

And this means it’s time to clean out the fridge.

So not only does my plastics cabinet stay organized more easily, my fridge stays neater too.

Nony blogs daily at A Slob Comes Clean where she writes the completely honest (and never-ending) story of her deslobification process. She shares the truth about cleaning and organizing methods that actually work in real-life. And she’s funny.