Pantry Project, Part 2

There's never enough time on these trips home to get all of my organizing done. Some trips, I don't even get everything unpacked before I have to turn around and head back to Mama's. I haven't done any more to organize my pantry, except to add more canned tomatoes and try to whittle down the bean and soup supply.

If, however, you looked closely at those pictures of my stacks, some of them look crooked. The tall boxes were specifically intended to help me stack cans three high, but some of those stacks lean--or wobble--or worse: fall over when anything gets bumped. This is because of how the cans are made, not because I can't stack one item on top of another.

The problem is with the bottom of the cans. The cans that are flat don't stack so well. It takes more time to try to position them so that they are exactly aligned, the top of one holding up the bottom of another. If any alignment is off, the "tower" of three will lean or fall over or misalign the adjacent tower. Cans with rounded bottoms nest so that the bottom of one can fits handily into the top of another. I haven't tried to stack any of these four high, but a tower of three is quite stable. Stacking also goes quickly because there is less effort given to alignment.

Here's a tower of flat-bottomed cans:

I deliberately stacked this tower so that the top can was out of line. (I couldn't stack the middle can out of line without toppling the whole thing.) This shows, in exaggerated mode, the pantry problem that flat-bottomed cans can cause.

Here's another view of the misalignment. What this shows, among other things, is that I need a new camera. (Note to self: Time to stop procrastinating.)

Here's a tower of round-bottomed cans:

There seems to be a slight lean here, but the same angle shows up in the flat-bottom stack. I think it's the camera angle. This tower was stable enough to be moved aside with one hand holding the bottom can, whereas the flat-bottomed tower needed two hands to cover the points where two cans meet.

Looking at my pantry, I found two kinds of what I am calling round-bottomed cans. As it turns out, one of the cans that fit into the top of the lower can isn't rounded at all. The can on the left has a distinct rim on its bottom, in the same manner as flat-bottomed cans, but this rim is slightly smaller than its top rim. The can's bottom rim will fit nicely into the top rim of another can when it is stacked. The can in the middle is the typical flat-bottomed can. The one on the right is a round-bottom can with no rim.

I tried to find out more about how these cans are made so that I could be (a) more precise in my terminology and (b) get ready to advocate for the process that led to better stacking in my pantry. So far, I haven't found the information I need. No doubt this is because I still don't know the terminology for what I am looking for.

In the meantime, the history of cans is semi-interesting. Check out Wikipedia's discussions of tin cans and aluminum cans. And ponder this:

• In the US, we recycle more food cans than beverage cans (by percent).
• In the US, we could save the equivalent of one day's worth of oil consumption by increasing our recycling of beverage cans to 100%.