Help me have a well-managed pantry.

My wife kind of has this problem of laying in more stuff than we can really use before it spoils, so i know what you mean. Somebody will probably stop by with a book that might help. But basically, it's discipline, you don't need spreadsheets. You need to get in the habit of using the stuff rather than building up supplies. Lots of stuff will keep in your fridge or pantry for a Long Time, like anything canned or bottled. We're talking years. Don't worry too much about those things. Everything else spoils, sooner rather than later. And everybody ends up throwing out some stuff, it's pretty unavoidable without severe discipline. But the basic principle should be to stop buying bulk and start buying in small quantities -- small meaning enough for one meal, in the case of veggies and other very short-term fridge things, and a week or two for things like cereal, crackers, etc. in your pantry. Shop two to three times a week rather than weekly or less often. Your food will be fresher and you'll be healthier. Stuff in the fridge like jars of jam, mustard, chutney, whatever, will actually last quite a while, but challenge yourself frequently to make a meal out of whatever is in the fridge. Hunt through, find interesting ingredients, spread them on the counter and go to work. As you do this you'll notice other things in there that won't fit today's meal, but you'll make a mental note to use them tomorrow with something else.

"years" if not opened, is what I mean.

Thanks beagle, but no, I'm pretty confident that I need spreadsheets. Not exactly, of course. But I mean, "discipline", given my personality type, is very much supported by things like spreadsheets, and definitive, exhaustive references. "Discipline" is not supported (for my personality type) by (no offense) vague things like "some stuff keeps a long time" and "other stuff spoils".

Cook's Illustrated is a great resource for kitchen management. The newest issue has an article about how to keep produce fresher for a longer period of time. This included specifying what should be kept where, how to wrap it, how long certain items keep, etc. Spices and dried herbs are something that people keep for waaaaaaaaaay too long. If it's been around for a year or two (or longer), it's probably lost a lot of its flavor. Also, make sure that the cool, dark parts of your pantry are really cool. This will add to the lifespan of your dried goods, and things like flour, rice, oils.

I think if you get in the habit of religiously labeling everything with date bought & date opened, you will have 90% of the problem taken care of. That can be a handwritten note on a sticker, a computerized spreadsheet, or something else -- the key is actually keeping that information current. You will want to also make a periodic inventory, once or twice a year, to update your spreadsheet, get rid of anything that has been there too long or that you don't like, etc. Basically, act like your pantry is part of a commercial operation, not a regular home pantry.

Forktine, thanks, but labeling, organizing, and inventor... uh... inventorying (?) is definitely not the problem. I would have no problem doing all that stuff - in fact, I'd probably do it to a degree that most people would find bizarre - if the information that I was recording were useful to me. The problem is that that information - e.g. "Opened on June 18, 2008" - is not currently useful to me. So I (currently) have no incentive to bring all of my awesome anal retentive powers to bear on the situation.

I'm not sure I have a handle on what your problem is. To use one of your analogies: is your problem that you keep buying full boxes of blerk, only using a little of it, and then throwing it out because it looks funky later? Or is your problem more that you buy a full box of blerk, but don't know how to keep it? If it's the former, then it's a matter of knowing exactly how much blerk you use on a regular basis -- and how much sneck, fizzip, and zipf as well. That's a trial-and-error thing -- only you know exactly how much sneck is too much for you, how often you'd use fizzip, and whether or not you can just do without zipf. And the only way to know that for sure is figuring out through your own observations over time. The only way to know that is to start paying attention to your own habits -- what you do, what recipes you go to again and again, and watch yourself and watch what you do. After a while you'll begin to notice "huh, I do tend to get a lot of fizzip, don't I?" And you'll know it's more of a priority. If it's the later problem, that you get blerk but you don't know how to store it, that's a simple Google search for "food storage advice." I cant find the link right now, but I once found a comprehensive chart that listed how much each foodstuff stayed good, and how to store it.

For the first part of your question ("are there any books or websites or anything that would help with this? Any programs to keep track of this stuff? Anything to help with the fundamental problems of "how long does that keep" and "how do I keep it appropriately""), I recommend what researching what the restaurants do by looking at their standards. Research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_Analysis_and_Critical_Control_Points and http://books.google.com/books?id=lOlUTT37-9sC&pg=PA31&lpg=PA31&dq=potentialy+dangerous+foods&source=web&ots=-OZ9ACBKs0&sig=Vlg1ec7o8TMhU7h8kASe1u7IQnA&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result#PPP1,M1. http://ask.metafilter.com/94446/Help-me-have-a-wellmanaged-pantry#1380316: Basically, act like your pantry is part of a commercial operation, not a regular home pantry. Forktine has a good point; from working in kitchens I'd say the three most important tools to a chef is a thermometer, a roll of masking tape, and a sharpie. Before taste and texture and presentation, a chef has to be sure that they are not going to send anyone to the hospital. Along those lines, go to a good restaurant and look at the specials. They fall into two categories, 1) a seasonal item that they can't make for you later, and 2) something we have too much of that we have to sell before it spoils. Similarly, you're trying to make use of your foodstuffs to make appealing meals without risking any foodborne illness. The second part of your question ("how can I plan to use what I buy") is even more difficult. Not too long ago, this was an almost-full-time occupation for one member of the household to utilize resources and plan meals. Nowadays, most cookbooks assume that you have infinite resources and do not help you reduce your food expenses. It takes a lot of practice and knowledge to turn your leftovers and inventory-on-hand into a respectable meal. These skills for managing your menu and pantry come with time. If you are willing to do some grunt work in exchange for some good experience, approach the chef at a restaurant you enjoy eating at and ask if you can work some kitchen shifts in exchange for the opportunity to observe and learn. A good chef is a good teacher and you can pickup skills in a week in the kitchen that a lifetime with cookbooks can't give you.

http://www.foodsafety.gov/~fsg/f01chart.html is the first result from googling "food storage chart", and there are many other possibilities. Of course, things get a bit more complicated -- there is the time something can be stored before it goes bad, and the time something can be stored before it isn't quite so great anymore. You can eat some pretty grey disgusting meat and it probably won't kill you, but a nice freshly-bought steak will taste a lot better. (Well, and then you complicate this again with the things, like meat and cheese and so on, that people like to age at home beyond the point where you could ever sell such a disgusting decaying mess, but the flavors from aging food in a controlled process are really attractive to some people.) So your spreadsheet needs some adaptability and, uh, "multilayeredness" -- for example, a carrot from the farmers' market is great eaten fresh that first day. After a week in the fridge, it is getting soft but is still fine. A few days later, it isn't really for eating raw anymore, but you can still use it for soup and cooking. Bread is the same -- great fresh, then when slightly stale it makes good french toast, and then when it is really stale it can become croutons, soup thickener, or bread pudding. That is, when something is "too old" and should be moved on really depends on what you are making, and a real key to kitchen management that minimizes waste is in buying and using food so as to take advantage of those layered uses -- most food (milk aside, assuming you are not making your own cheese and other cultured products) is not binary -- it's usually not "bad" or "good", but instead in some inbetween stage. Too old for one use, too new for another, but just right for something. And that doesn't usually come from a rigid attention to dates -- it comes from an organic sense of how something is aging, which will depend on temperature, humidity, original quality, and so on. What am I suggesting? I'm saying that you need to layer the food safety charts, like I linked to, with a sense of how to use food all the way from when it comes into your house to when the scraps go into the compost bin (or down the garbage disposal). You do that partly by keeping an inventory (in your head or in a spreadsheet) and partly by planning your cooking around what is in the kitchen that is really good and needs to be eaten right now (those perfect farmers' market carrots) and what is in the kitchen and is getting old and needs to be eaten right now (that bread that can make croutons tonight but will be rock hard tomorrow), and everything in between. It's a weird mix of being analytical -- because ages and dates matter -- and being all hippy-dippy and getting in sense with the rhythms of your cooking and eating, so that what you buy has a clear relation to what and how you eat.