How I manage my own food

Purpose:

– So I can choose what I want to eat at any time on my own

– Keeping food organized so that food doesn’t go bad

– Making decisions about food preparation when no one is there

– Communicating between many different people who are all helping me with food

How it works:

I purchased a long strip of whiteboard sticker and mounted two different pieces onto the fridge, one on the freezer door and the other the fridge door. The whiteboards are used to list everything inside in a way that I can access at any given time without help.

Everyone has to keep it updated when anything goes in and out; when something gets used up or is brought in, it gets written down. Things must be written down in a large font, legible to me in a colour I can see. As you can see there is some variety in the photos, with different people’s styles of writing. When there are multiple items of the same food, we use a tally system to keep track.

Freezer specific:

Anything in the freezer must be labelled with the food and the date it was put in. This is important because most foods in my freezer are blended and look the same. Because the date is on the food itself, the date is not included on the whiteboard. We divide the freezer into sections: meals, snacks and ingredients. The inside of the freezer is organized this way as best as possible. Every so often we go through the freezer and find anything that is old, we organize these into one bin so they can be prioritized in eating.

Fridge Specific:

The food in the fridge is labelled with the type of food that it is. The name of the food is then written on the outside of the fridge with the date the food was placed in the fridge. If it is a container of milk or nutritional drink we label the lid with an “O” to indicate which bottle is open. Everything in the fridge has a designated place; food is not organized in a specific way (other than the vegetables go in the crisper) but things are generally put back in the same spot they were taken from. Certain items of food are kept in the door of the fridge so that I can reach them, like the puree I use to take my meds with. The outside of the fridge is labelled in sections. These sections are meals, snacks, perishable ingredients, stable ingredients and crisper. This allows me to plan meals and snacks I want to eat, and cook. We use a separate colour to write the headings and the lines that separate the sections.