…to expect my husband to check the cupboards and fridge before shopping for food?

[Nettletheelf]

DH and I operate a weekly rota for shopping and cooking: one week on, one week off.

I get annoyed when he buys stuff that we already have. I've raised it with him (gently) several times. He prefers to order stuff from Ocado rather than visiting supermarkets, so he orders food from our house.

When he says, "is there anything particular you want?", I reply, "yes, I'd like you to check the fridge, freezer and cupboard before you do the Ocado order".

He never does it. Never. It drives me insane. The Ocado order he put in yesterday just arrived. He has ordered stuff we already had in abundance. We now have:

• 3 large bags of penne pasta.

• 16 eggs.

• 4 boxes of cherry tomatoes.

• 3 bunches of asparagus.

• 3 bags of red chillies.

• 3 bags of ginger root.

• 8 chicken breasts.

• 6 lemons

• 18 onions.

It's just me and him - there are no children living with us. We're not skint or anything, but I can't stand waste.

He also leaves stuff he buys on 'his' weeks lying in the fridge and never thinks to get rid of them, so I'm always throwing out manky e.g. creme fraiche that's ten days over its use by date and has been shoved to the back of the fridge by DH.

Some stuff I can freeze, but that's hardly the point. He thinks that life is too short to spend two minutes checking what food we already have. On 'his' shopping weeks, we often run out of bread. He works from home, I don't. He is five minutes' walk from a supermarket. I'll often get home from work late to find that there's no bread for the morning. Hs response: "I'm too busy". This has also happened when I've returned late from a few nights away. I think that he's being selfish.

Should I just suck it up? He acts as if I'm unreasonable but I think that household chores, like making sure that we have enough food, should be shared.

yanbu at all. Not even slightly.

YANBU. Doesn't everyone look in the fridge etc. before writing a shopping list?

That's what I thought!

Ha ha ha. YABVVVU to seriously expect a man to do this... My ex would buy 8lbs of onions (for example) because it was a bargain! Regardless of the fact that we couldn't eat them before they went mouldy...

[hides from the inevitable and deserved accusations of sexism and more...]

well, he sounds quite daft, but I equally think that you saying he should be responsible for clearing the fridge of gone-off stuff he bought is also daft. And just because he works from home and you don't doesn't mean you can't pick stuff up at lunchtime or on the way home (unless of course you won't be anywhere near a shop). Sharing is all well and good but this doesn't sound like it's working. Some people are better at some chores than others, surely it would be better to split it along those lines instead?

I could pick stuff up at lunchtime IF HE TOLD ME WE WERE OUT OF STUFF!

So if he eats all the bread, he could either (1) buy some more because it's his shopping week or (2) ask me to pick some up if I'm passing a shop.

I wouldn't expect, on his shopping week, to have to review the levels of foodstuffs every morning. Although I do do that on my week because I'm responsible for making sure we have the right amount of food that week.

I am laughing about the massive sack of onions!

I don't check before shopping, don't do a list etc.
I think if you share something like this you have to put up with how the other person does things.
my dh buys completely different things to me and often things that make me go , it's not really important is it?

Oh, and the reason we went for the one week on/one week off system is that if we didn't, I'd end up doing all the shopping.

He likes cooking…usually with exotic, hard to source, expensive ingredients which he only needs a tiny amount of, the rest being wasted!

potato, I don't mind that he buys different stuff to me. What I object to is his buying stuff we already have, so that it gets wasted.

He's behaving like a child 'look at me doing my share of the chores, aren't I great!'

But he's only doing it half heartedly. Is he hoping that id he continues to be crap that you'll take over? Who plans meals and cooks? I'm guessing not him otherwise he wouldn't just order food willy nilly.

It does my head in to see people be so flippant about food wastage when so much the worlds population starves. It honestly is criminal if you ask me.

Stuff like this drives me insane

dh actually came to me upstairs yesterday to ask if we needed bread or anything while he was at the shop He had to walk past the kitchen to get to the stairs.

so are you saying that you refuse to check to see if any essentials are needed if it's his shopping week? Sorry, but you both sound ridiculous. What does it matter if you do all the shopping? Goodness, sort it out like adults - both of you!

You can't insist that other adults perform household tasks to your personal specifications (assuming they pull their weight generally). You have two options IMO - put up and shut up, or do it yourself ;)

I never check the cupboards and often do buy stuff, like loo roll or coffee bags, that we already have lots of. DH might make a wry joke about it and eventually I might remember that we already have a strategic stock of loo rolls that would last us through a nuclear crisis and stop buying them for a few weeks.

I agree, Pinky. I am checking out local food banks to see whether they want any of the extra stuff.

And yes, I think he is being deliberately crap in the hope that I'll expect less of him. We each plan the meals and cook them on 'our' weeks. He seems to like cooking, but he doesn't like the associated work like:

(1) washing pans (leaves them lying around, hoping that our cleaning lady, who comes once a week, will wash them, and seems horrified at the thought of washing the grill pan, even when he has been grilling fish, and we all know how quickly fish remnants start to smell. I usually end up doing it myself after he ignores requests)

(2) clearing out of date food from the fridge (I always do this. He just doesn't notice, even though he's at home all day)

(3) cleaning the cooker top

I could go on. Is it our lot in life to be goaded into doing our menfolk's work for them because they think domestic stuff (apart from pretending to be a celebrity chef) is beneath them?

I do most of our shopping, but DH does sometimes pop out for something in the evening, he'll say "is there anything you want?", I say "no", off he goes, then half an hour after he gets back I'll discover we're out of milk, if I ask why he didn't get some he just says "you didn't say we needed it". Why doesn't he check?

He never writes things he's used up on the shopping list either, drives me mad.

If you are sharing expenses roughly equally, then he could pay for groceries he orders and you pay for ones you order. In that case he would be wasting his own money. (I don't think you can tell a partner not to spend their own money in ways you find wasteful.)

Read the post, River Tam. I don't REFUSE to check the levels of foodstuffs every day during 'his' week. I just don't EXPECT to have to do it, every day, because he's supposed to be responsible for it that week.

It doesn't mean that I won't do it. I'd be quite hungry if I didn't. I just wish that he'd pull his weight a bit more.

Oh god I couldn't live like this. I'd have to take over the shopping and rota bog cleaning instead or something. I know exactly what's in our fridge, what needs eating first and the whole thing gets cleaned out before new food gets put in post-shopping.

It's a total bugbear of mine as I grew up in a house where my parents shopped monthly!!!!! And the fridge was always full of manky stuff and mouldy things wrapped up in foil.

My DH does most of the shopping and cooking for our family. This came about for multiple different reasons; He would go to the supermarket nearly every day regardless of whether we had a house full of food or not, He would complain all the time about me needing a menu plan and say I should just buy the ingredients for meals, I was working nights so would get out of bed and have to cook tea straight away and needed menu plans, he started finishing work at 4:30 so would often be home before I managed to get the children home from their musical activities.

He has started to cook using a menu plan as he has recognized that you do actually need to plan your meals around where everyone is going to be on a set evening.

However; he will only cook from recipes and he won't look at what we have in the fridge prior to deciding what we are going to eat in the coming week.
He plans meals around meat we have in the freezer rather than items we have in the fridge which are going out of date. Hence a fair amount of food wastage.

I am going to have to tackle this again with him as it's annoying when he walks in and asks me what's for tea on my day off as there's no written menu plan or he tells me what's for tea and I get half way through cooking it and realise we only have half the ingredients.

Case in point; Saturday it was only DS and I for tea. As he is on his way out the door, DH tells me that I need to use up the pork loin fillet from the fridge and the cubed beef as both went out of date the previous day(!). I decide to use the beef for the casserole he intended it for and ask DS to make that whilst I make our kebabs. DS, being 11, reads the packet. We have double the meat needed and no carrots. Nice one!

OP, I'm not sure how you can get your DH to check the fridge before ordering unless perhaps you incorporate it into a chore the day before shopping? Perhaps if you cleared the fridge at the end of your week, you could hand him a list of what you have in the fridge and he knows then. Knot to order any of the above.

yanbu.

You now have a load of fresh food that might get wasted.

Is it our lot in life to be goaded into doing our menfolk's work for them because they think domestic stuff (apart from pretending to be a celebrity chef) is beneath them?

I don't think it should be seen as a gender issue. There are plenty of slovenly, lazy and/or entitled women in the world.

Other people (male or female) just have low standards. Kill him and bury him under the patio, and be more careful who you share a house with in future.

He's responsible for shopping; that doesn't mean he'll perform that task exactly as you would.

Almost all of those things can either be stored for a few weeks, or frozen. I'm struggling to understand what the issue is unless you're seriously short of money or storage space.

sure, it does sound like he could pull his weight more. But this 'his week, my week' system clearly isn't working, and frankly sounds a ludicrous way to live. How is he in the house overall? If it's just this he's a bit crap with then I would leave it. If he's crap overall then I would leave him.

I've got one of those mothers, Sebsmummy. I remember chucking out a tin of M&S chunky chicken (which dates it firmly to the 1980s!) that was four years out of date. When I looked again, a few days later, she had taken the tin out of the bin and returned it to the cupboard!

I don't think that I'm imposing unreasonable standards on my husband, though.

Gibble my blood pressure went up just reading your post!! Bloody hell thank god I have an easy going bloke who is happy with a mix if ready meals and home cooked food.