Most of us don’t lose good food to bad cooking. We lose it quietly, inside the kitchen cupboard, because very few of us were ever taught how to store pantry staples properly.

The whole wheat flour that makes your bread taste slightly bitter. The chickpea flour with tiny insects in it. The walnuts that taste stale and papery. The cinnamon that smells of nothing. The cocoa that has set into hard, dull lumps. None of these went bad because they were cheap or old stock. In almost every case, they went bad because of how they were stored.