What's happening
ADHD and forgotten food is the fridge version of out of sight, out of mind. You do a proper shop with good intentions, then the peppers get pushed behind the milk, half a tin of beans goes in a bowl at the back, and a week later you find them doing something unpleasant. Meanwhile you've bought another bag of spinach because you didn't know you still had one.
How to get moving
Pick one clear box or tray at eye level and make it your eat-first box. Anything opened, any leftovers and anything with a date in the next three days goes in there, and you check it before you start cooking or open a takeaway app. Put new shopping behind older stuff, not in front, and use see-through tubs for leftovers so you can tell what's inside.
Before you go shopping, take a photo of the inside of your fridge with the door open and the salad drawer pulled out. When you're in the shop wondering whether you've got carrots, check the photo instead of guessing. It takes five seconds and saves you buying a third jar of the same pesto.
Important tip
When you sort the eat-first box, check which kind of date each thing has. Best before is about quality, so food is usually still safe after it if it's been stored properly. Use-by is about safety, and the government's food labelling guidance says eating food after it could make you ill. So use-by food goes to the front, or into the freezer before the date.
This is lived-experience content. It is not a promise that a particular idea will work for everybody.