No Pantry Porn in This House

'The orderly arrangement of abundance' doesn't stand a chance here.

This is not my pantry. (Photo courtesy of KraftMaid)

Dr. Jenna Drenten, an associate professor of marketing at Loyola University of Chicago, is apparently no Martha Stewart. I don’t know if she bakes a mean pie, but I do know she is not a fan of highly organized pantries. As she writes in The Conversation, the current craze to purchase lots of matchy-matchy containers to store chips, cereal and baking items is expensive and can lead to needless anxiety.

“Sure, all of those baskets and bins serve a functional purpose in the home: seeing what you need, when you need it,” Drenten writes. “But the social pressure to curate a perfect pantry might make some women work overtime. They can’t just shove store-bought boxes of snacks into a cupboard; they must neatly place the grab-and-go snacks into a fully stocked pantry that rivals a boutique corner store.”

A curated pantry is a status symbol, according to Drenten, one that is meant to separate the haves from the have-nots. “Cleanliness has historically been used as a cultural gatekeeping mechanism to reinforce status distinctions based on a vague understanding of ‘niceness’: nice people, with nice yards, in nice houses, make for nice neighborhoods,” she writes.

The majority of people obsessed with what she calls “pantry porn” are, according to the author, white women. “What lies beneath the surface of this anti-messiness, pro-niceness stance is a history of classist, racist and sexist social structures,” she asserts.

Let’s review. Those who partake in pantry porn are highly anxious people (mostly white women) who want to stand out as “nice,” unlike their messier and, no doubt, less cultured counterparts. They scroll through countless “how to organize your pantry” videos on TikTok, buy hundreds of dollars worth of supplies at The Container Store and then manically purge, clean and restock their spacious walk-in pantries every two months. When they go to a friend’s house, they’re always eyeing the pantry to see if it’s larger, cleaner and more organized than theirs. If it is, they will go home and make things right in their own pantry. All in the name of status.

Simply put, if you are obsessed with organizing and neatly labeling your food staples, your privilege is showing. Also, you’re going to have a nervous breakdown because you will constantly be emptying boxes of cereal and bags of flour into pristinely clean glass containers.

Immediately after reading Drenten’s piece, I ran to my coat-closet-size pantry and took in the sight. A row of cereal boxes, their tops apparently opened by teeth instead of hands, sits on the second-highest shelf. A collection of vinegars and oils vies for nearby space. Three - count ‘em, three - opened bags of tortilla chips occupy the rest of the shelf, along with an unopened bag of Sun Chips and a sleeve of Shop Rite rice cakes that I’m pretty sure were purchased during last summer’s trip to Cape May, New Jersey. (Every once in a while, my husband takes one out as a snack. Evidently, they remain crisp.)

The shelf below that one features a melange of items: three boxes of various types of pasta (all opened, of course), a box of teabags (no one really drinks tea in this house, so don’t ask how long they’ve been there), a few annoyingly large boxes of crackers and such from Costco and some microwave popcorn.

Onto the next shelf. We’ve got a few cans of tuna and sardines, a jar of natural peanut butter, a few jars of jelly, a tub of coconut oil and some Christmas candy that may or may not be eaten before Easter. Cans of beans, tomato sauce, condensed milk, along with paper towels and a few other items, dot the lowest shelf.

I saved the top shelf for last because it actually does display containers. A couple of years ago, I bought some clear plastic ones on Amazon. (I know, not even glass. How peasant-like.) The idea was that I would start small, buying a few and filling them with staples. As I became enthralled by the neatness of the whole thing, I’d buy more containers until every single item in my pantry was in a special container with beautifully printed labels on all of them.

Yeah, that never happened. I started to store things like brown sugar and nuts in the clear containers, but eventually they’d get moved by someone and then I’d forget I had them. So when I would need brown sugar, I’d do a mad search in the pantry and assume I didn’t have any. I’d run to the store and buy more. Then a few weeks (months?) later, I’d be cleaning the pantry and I’d find the original brown sugar - hard as a rock - in the cylindrical container way in the back of the top shelf. And then I’d swear.

Maybe Drenten is right; it’s maddening to try to keep up with the whole special container thing.

Another plus about not having a highly organized pantry: I am clearly not trying to assert my elitism. You are not going to walk into my pantry and say, “Now there’s a woman trying to show her superiority over the lower classes and people of color.” No microggressions here. I am simply embracing my working-class roots and my own brand of chaos.

Drenten’s article is at times very engaging. She talks about the history of storing food in American households. Early on, the pantry was an ordinary, hidden space. “In the late 1800s, the butler’s pantry emerged as an architectural trend among high society,” Drenten explains. “This small space, tucked between the kitchen and dining room, was a marker of status – an area to hide both the food and the people who prepared it.”

Interestingly enough, my house also has a butler’s pantry. It is a cute little nook between our rather small kitchen and our rather large dining room. This would have been where the maid or cook prepared meals for the original owners before serving it to them in the dining room. (Our house was built around 1915.) Today, it is still where the cook prepares the meals for the family, except I am the cook. And the server. And the cleaning crew. At times I’m sure my family has been happy to hide me away in there.

These days, Denten says, the walk-in pantry has become one of the most popular features in newer homes. Because of its prominence, the pantry demands the same attention to decor as the rest of the house. Somehow, making your pantry all fancy and organized is equated with showing your privilege.

Is it, though?

Maybe for some people. Perhaps they want to keep up with the Joneses by having a pantry the size of their bedroom and filling it with expensive glass and metal containers and calligraphed labels. That might be a status symbol for those who imagine everything as a status symbol.

It’s also possible that many of the people obsessed with tidy pantries like the organizational aspect. They appreciate that everything is uniform, monochromatic, maybe even alphabetized. They won’t have to pull items off of shelves to find the coffee they bought last week. It’ll be in the tall glass container on the second shelf, next to the cereal (alphabetical order, after all).

And what about those of us who don't partake in pantry porn? Are we lower class citizens, dirty birds, lazy bums? Maybe. I’d rather think of it as food being plentiful and readily available at my house. It doesn’t matter if you’re one of my kids or the plumber coming to fix the sink. I don’t care what color you are or what your socioeconomic status is. If you want a handful of Goldfish or a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios or some peanut butter for a sandwich, it’s all right there, yours for the taking. Rip open the bag, twist the lid and enjoy. Just put it back sort of where you found it.

We’ll call it “hospitality porn.”

This is my pantry. Help yourself!