Most pantry lists run to forty items and describe a shop, not a kitchen. The useful version is much shorter: the things that combine with almost anything and turn whatever is in the fridge into a meal.
The base: something to build the plate on
Rice, pasta, potatoes and eggs. Between them they cover nearly every dinner, they keep for weeks or months, and they are cheap. Eggs deserve special mention: they are the fastest hot meal in any kitchen and they rescue portions that are too small to be a dinner on their own.
The tin shelf: protein and a sauce, already cooked
Tinned tomatoes, tinned beans or chickpeas, and tinned fish. Tomatoes plus pasta is dinner. Beans plus rice is dinner. Tinned fish plus potatoes is dinner. All three keep for a year and all three need nothing except heat.
The flavour four: what stops it tasting like nothing
Salt, oil, garlic, and one acid — lemon, vinegar, whatever you like. Almost every dish that tastes flat is missing salt or acid rather than an ingredient. Add one condiment you actually like: soy sauce, mustard, chilli paste, whatever ends up in your food most often. One good jar does more than five you never open.
What to leave off the list
Speciality flours, six kinds of vinegar, spices for a cuisine you cook twice a year. These are the items that sit unopened and make the cupboard feel full while the fridge produces nothing. Buy narrow and deep. Twelve things you use weekly beat forty you use annually.
Keep the base, the tins and the flavour four in stock and the fridge stops being the problem. Almost any vegetable plus these is a dinner.