Pantry: for the Monk in every Mac user

You’ve seen those Capital One commercials on television where the Barbarians ask, “What’s in your wallet?” The question is a good one because I don’t really know. Mine is stuffed and stuffed into a purse that’s stuffed, too. What about your pantry? You know, that place near the kitchen where everything gets stored. Do you know what’s there? Pantry can help.

What you don’t know

There’s probably some truth in the old saying, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.” I’m pretty sure there’s stuff in my wallet that’s been there, untouched for years.

A wallet differs quite a bit from the pantry in my kitchen. I live in a decent sized, but very old apartment building which still has a pantry; almost walk in. That’s where I put whatever I want, but mostly things I need in the kitchen.

My wallet is where I put what I think I might need sometime in the future. Things go in the wallet but seldom come out. The pantry, on the other hand, is dynamic storage, ebbing and flowing between my purchases and meals.

‘The’ Pantry

Pantry for the Mac is a nostalgic utility which tells you what’s in your pantry, in and of itself somewhat nostalgic, and what you need to buy to replenish said pantry.

The concept itself is pure and simple. You track what’s in the pantry and what leaves the pantry so you always know what you have (and, inversely, what you don’t have or what you need to have).

Simple, right? Pantry even lets other family members see the same list of what’s in and what’s not. You can even sync to PantryList.net. All these features and all this effort for a utility that tracks what you’ve got in your pantry.

There’s two problems here. Pantry is a dinosaur. And I don’t live with Monk.

Dinosaur

25 years ago personal computer advertisements extolled the virtues of keeping track of your recipes on a computer. Who does that? Pantry is merely an evolved version of the recipe tracker.

Think of the effort required to go back and forth from your Mac to your pantry to set up the first inventory of what’s in the pantry. Then, think of the discipline required to keep the two in sync. Whatever comes out of the pantry has to be noted in Pantry. Whatever goes in the pantry, also goes into Pantry.

That’s a lot of back and forth effort just to let me know what I need to buy at the corner super market. Where’s the iPhone version? At least with an iPhone version I can scan one and the other while standing in the pantry.

Yes, there are plenty of grocery shopping apps for the iPhone, but Pantry is a cool idea whose time came and went. It’s the season of the iPhone. But that’s not the only problem.

Monk

If you’re the kind of person who has a complete inventory of what’s in your pantry and your kitchen cabinets, and you keep them in some semblance of synchronization, then you probably wonder why the TV show Monk is so popular.

Monk is obsessive compulsive about everything; so much so that he can’t function normally at anything except solving murders (which isn’t that normal to begin with).

Isn’t maintaining a kitchen pantry’s inventory on your computer a little obsessive compulsive? Is moving the effort to an iPhone any less so? Pantry is nice as it is. It’s free. It’s useful. An iPhone version would be better.  Either way, it’s a little more organized than I want to be.