My clientele are mostly urban dwellers, many in rowhomes with modest kitchens, struggling to fit all the equipment and ingredients they’d like to keep to make cooking at home as hassle-free as possible.

And while I’m typically very respectful of client’s preferences and tailor my approach to suit their needs, I’m really prescriptive about junk drawers.

We urban dwellers can not have junk drawers. We can have public parks, and lively pubs, and renowned museums, but not junk drawers.

If we only have 5 drawers in our kitchen, one entire drawer can not be a junk drawer. That’s 20% percent of our prime drawer real estate dedicated to stuff we rarely if ever use. The kitchen utensils we use all the time deserve that space instead.

Most of things that are stored in the typical junk drawer deserve to be a) discarded, b) assigned a home with other like objects somewhere else c) contained in a very small space. As in not an entire drawer, because induced demand, y’all.

There are items that are useful and don’t necessarily belong to a wider category, but don’t need to commandeer an entire drawer.

For me, this includes a small Bic that I use to light candles and a wide rubber band I keep for opening tricky jars. They live in a tiny section of my utensil divider, where they can’t creep and multiply like gremlins.

This does NOT include underinked promotional pens, bread bag ties, torn receipts, soy sauce packets, and old batteries. Those don’t get to live in my home, let alone my kitchen’s prime real estate.

If you want those “junk drawer” things close at hand, put the useful miscellany in a small box or bin within a drawer. Maybe, just maybe, if we indulge a little teeny bit of disorder in the form of a small bin, we might feel more capable of maintaining our otherwise organized kitchens.

But for the love of all the things, don’t pay good money for a bunch of acrylic drawer dividers to organize things you don’t use. Purge it.