never have sodapop in the fridge, its water, milk, cranberry grapefruit or OJ.
When I was single, I didn’t buy milk, but I always kept powdered milk on the shelf - I’d reconstitute it for baking. It was lots cheaper than throwing away unused milk.
My mother will take stuff that needs to be thrown out of my hand and put it back on the shelf. There’s also some solidified vinegar in the basement that she always references when I say “where’s the balsamic” even though we’ve bought a NEW bottle. When we moved out of our old house into this new one we had to tear some stuff out of her hands.
I don’t want to make it sound like my parents have some sort of disgusting pack rat type house b/c my mom is a neatfreak and their house looks like a furniture commercial ad for Cost Plus/World Market but both my parents grew up really poor and it’s very difficult for them to throw things out even when they badly need to be thrown out.
Alcoholic beverages.
Nearly everyone I know has at least a few beers and/or bottle of wine.
Our staples:
Rice
Jugs of water (learned from last year’s hurricane season)
Red wine
Oyster sauce
Fish sauce
Sweet soy
Broccoli
Onions
Milk
Bread
Cereal
Chicken Nuggets
Frozen pizza
Eggos
Queso Manchego
The group, from milk down, are kid staples. The top group is the grown up staples. If it weren’t for the Shibblets we might not have much in the way of what most Americans think of as staples.
I live alone…
I don’t keep flour, sugar, salt, alcohol, lettuce, eggs, ice, coffee, or tea in my house. Or any juice (though I’ll buy some OJ if I anticipate getting drunk, because I tend to crave it when hungover). Or foods that people tend to cook with, like onions, garlic, etc. Or meat of any kind: if I want chicken, a hamburger, or some bacon, I’ll go to a restaurant.
Sometimes there is bread. Usually not, though. In fact, I just gave away my toaster this morning.
The only thing to drink is water (filtered and chilled, from my Brita pitcher). I always have to remember to pick up soda or beer or something when people are coming over (but I never do remember to make ice cubes). I keep some Kool-Aid mix in the pantry for emergencies. 
Very rarely will you find fresh fruit or veggies. I like to keep baby carrots in the fridge for snacking, and sometimes I’ll get some bananas, but that’s about it.
There is always milk in my fridge, but no more than 1/2 gallon at a time. I don’t drink it, but I cook with it often enough to keep it around. There is always margarine (or, these days, light butter) in my fridge, too, also for cooking.
I think we have the same fridge/freezer! I practically live on Stouffer’s and those pasta envelopes… 
Lots of people I know keep “cream of” soups around. You know, cream of chicken, cream of mushroom, etc. I guess some people make a lot of casseroles. I rarely ever have those soups - I can’t remember the last time I made something that needed cream of something.
Another staple already mentioned is soda - we can’t keep it around anymore. If it’s here, we’ll drink way too much of it, so once we finished our last pack a month ago, we stopped buying it.
Our staples are usually things like nuts, dried fruit, fresh fruit, vegetables, yogurt, milk, bread and the occasional chicken, beef or fish. We also buy a lot of Kashi breakfast bars - they’re really high in fiber, so if one of us is too lazy to make breakfast, my husband and I can just grab a bar in the morning.
Have you ever suggested he try it batter fried in lard?
I rarely keep fresh food around. Sometimes I buy fruit, when I think of it. I don’t know why I hardly ever buy fruit. The first part of the grocery store I go through is the produce section. I don’t keep alcohol on hand because I live on a “dry” campus, and we don’t have alcohol at home because of Dad. I always have soup, an emergency stash of ramen, bread, string cheese, water, and soda. I also keep a lot of tea around because I like to drink a cup or two before bed. I rarely drink coffee so I don’t have any. My parents always have coffee because Dad drinks two pots a day. Sometimes when we have company, since all the people who visit often are coffee drinkers, we’ll have made four pots of coffee in a day.
At home, we always have dried pasta, sauce, hamburger meat, ketchup, chicken, bread, sandwich meat, eggs, and Miracle Whip (for Dad, who will not knowingly eat mayo). We also keep flour and other baking things around because every month or so, someone will get a wild hair and want to bake. My parents only have ice cream in the house when I am there, since they forget to eat it. They buy a lot of potatoes, which often go bad since neither of them feel like making anything with them. I’m the only one who makes potato dishes with any regularity, but I don’t make them here since I don’t have a kitchen, and get tired of microwave baked potatoes really quickly.
I think you joke, but I had a roommate who really did this!
Usually I don’t have either in the house, but lately I’ve been eating bagels with peanut butter. Since I tend to just eat a handful of candy when I’m bored with real food, this is actually a step up.
The milk I bought for the first time in a year is quietly going bad in the back of the fridge. I buy cheese maybe twice a year. Almost never buy lettuce, but I have three bottles of dressing.
I’ve got a ton of food, but most of it is just loitering, left over from a recipe or crazy notion to try something new. Heart of Palm anyone? How about some rose syrup?
Yup. This is basically his logic, in that regard.
With some of the other stuff, he wants my brother and sister to “eat better”, which is good, considering my brother’s girth, but dinner is cooked in our house a maximum of 4 times a week, which includes times when we get fast food or something similar (not very often). The rest of the time, no one can be bothered to put a pan on the stove and cook anything. So it’s basically a scrounge around and find something to eat kind of situation, which would be fine if we had some normal meal-making staples of some kind around the house.
His end logic is basically wanting everyone in the house to “eat what we eat”, basically meaning that he controls the dietary intake of everyone in the house by cooking a meal, which we all then eat. The problem with his plan is that he doesn’t cook very often.
Another couple things missing from the OP:
Cheese: Same logic as with the bread and the milk. If it’s here, my brother will just sit around and eat it, whether it’s a block of cheese, or slices of pasteurized process cheese food.
Vegetables of any kind (this drives me absolutely nuts). If we’re going to use them in something that we have planned, they’re there. My family’s only use for vegetables, unless they’re canned ones, in which case I’m fine with eating them as a side or whatever, is in salad. Your typical iceberg lettuce-tomato-ranch dressing salad. The ranch dressing is included as an ingredient because all three are in about even quantities.
I’ve gone that route, but the reconstituted powder looks weird. And I do not use milk in cooking often enough for it to really matter.
Our major staple is soda – Pepsi and Diet Pepsi. Running out of soda is our major impetus to go to the store, and it’s the only thing we’ll make a special trip for.
We’ll shop when we’re running low on food, of course, but I don’t think we’ve ever gone to the store without buying soda.
Some of you guys are really scaring me. No veges? Eeek!
When the kids were little I used to buy Weetbix rather than Coco Pops or the more popular breakfast crap. The Weetbix would last for weeks, because it would only get eaten when the kids were actually HUNGRY.
The Coco Pops on the other hand wouldn’t even make it as far as the cupboard after shopping before being devoured. :rolleyes: Thus, I can understand the mentality of buying stuff that kids say they don’t like. It’s not irrational at all…especially when I DO buy the Coco Pops and hide them in a secret spot just for MEEEEEEEE. 
Anyway, as to the OP, I dunno what the staples are in others’ cupboards/fridges because I don’t inspect them when I go to visit. But I’m guessing that SOMEBODY is buying those horrid frozen meals from the supermarket…it ain’t me. The only stuff in my freezer are peas and some chicken fillets that I got on special last week. Everything else is fresh.
OK, so it sounds as though your father’s intent is mainly a good one (get everyone eating more healthily, etc), but beyond that, there is no plan. It’s great to want your kids to be healthy, but you have to provide the healthy things for them to eat—more vegetables, regular meals, etc. You can’t take something away without providing an alternative, in this respect.
I’m sure I’m not telling you anythin you hadn’t already figured out, and I am hijacking somewhat, so sorry.
Unless someone is visiting who wants them, I never have:
- coffee
- sodapop
- alcohol
- cereal
- bananas
- potato chips
- (hardly ever) cookies
- large packages of anything; I usually buy what I’m planning to eat within the next few days, since most perishable items bought in bulk will spoil before I finish them anyway.
But my mom and dad have been visiting this past week, so my kitchen is crowded with all this stuff. Who knows what I’ll find left for me (that I’ll never use) in the fridge, cabinets, and freezer after they go?
Our kitchen contains mainly just staples. I make virtually everything we eat from scratch, so there are no prepared foods to speak of in our house on a regular basis, except canned beans and a few cans of soup.
As others have said, we have no cereal in the house. We have two kids, but neither of them like cereal–at least not since they outgrew the Cheerios as finger food phase many years ago. My son occasionally gets it into his head that he would like to have cereal in the house as a snack, but after throwing out several nearly-full boxes of stale cereal last year, I finally just said “no more.” (My in-laws do keep cereal on hand for grandkids, but the stuff is normally so stale that no one will eat it.)
We do have “Cream of” soups on hand–but that’s because we like to eat them as soup. My 14yo daughter and I were at the grocery store last week, and she asked for Cream of Mushroom soup for lunch. As we were trying to find it, I pointed out to her that most people use it in things like chicken casserole, rather than eating it as soup, and she thought that sounded crazy.
We do not have bacon in the house. Neither hubby nor I grew up eating bacon on a regular basis, so we just don’t buy it. Occasionally I will buy a small can of bacon crumbles, for recipes that need a little bacon flavor.
We also don’t normally have salad dressing on hand. We do eat lots of salad, but I usually just make a French vinaigrette on the spot (closer to what Americans call Italian dressing) when we have salads.
If it weren’t for our 10yo son, we wouldn’t have ketchup. No one else likes it or eats it.
No cookies or salty/fried snack foods, either. Our underweight kids won’t eat them, and hubby and I would eat too many. I do keep a bag of popcorn kernels in the freezer for snack emergencies, but that’s about it.
It costs less to go to Golden Corral and have a bunch of salad there than it does to buy all the ingredients to make your own, which you then have to eat up before it goes bad. And at GC, you can have dinner, too, included in the price.
At home, we buy potatoes, lettuce, tomatoes and onions, and that’s about all.
Yeah, basically. I still eat 2/3 meals outside of the house, so I’m not too affected… it just makes me angry when I’m like “ooh, let’s have some cereal! That’s right, there is none.”