Managing the Fridge
Near the beginning of the pandemic, like many, I cleaned out my pantry and fridge in a big whirlwind. It felt good, productive, and was something to do when my mind was filled with that white noise of fear settling in like a dropped ice cream melting into the sidewalk cracks on a hot day. (Don’t ask me where that description came from, it’s a weird time and you just have to go with what you’re given). Back then people were still stockpiling toilet paper, and a lot of us were minimizing our outings — grocery shopping maybe every two weeks. So not only did it feel good to be organized, but it helped with the planning of menus, grocery lists, and the inventory of the everyday. You could fluctuate between hope and despair until you became paralyzed, or you could clean and organize things. You could make motions toward preparedness, though no one knew what exactly they were preparing for.
If you were the sort of person who had previously read any post-apocalyptic fiction — for me it was The Road by Cormac McCarthy and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel — probably a lot of unhelpful things were pressing up against your brain. And perhaps this had some effect on the contents of your fridge and pantry.
It was interesting to watch the trends (or participate in them) — the quarantini phase, the bread making phase, the hot chocolate bomb, the whipped coffee — have I missed anything? I hear we’ve moved into a health food phase, but maybe there was also a phase where we tried all the chips and cheezies.
Moyra Davey wrote about the fridge in her 2020 book, Index Cards. Safe to say she wrote this pre-pandemic, but it strikes a chord.
“I had a houseguest once who told me that all of his cooking was about managing his fridge…..I think of a fridge as something that needs to be managed. A well-stocked fridge always triggers a certain atavistic, metabolic anxiety, like that of the Neanderthal after the kill, faced with the task of needing to either ingest or preseve a massive abundance of food before spoilage sets in.”
“I get an unmistakable pleasure out of seeing…the contents of the fridge diminish, out of seeing the spaces between the food items get larger and better defined.”
“Once every ten days or so the fridge fills up with food and the Sisyphean cycle of ordering and chewing our way through it all begins anew. This rodent like behaviour is my metaphor for domestic survival: digging our way out, either from the contents of the fridge, or from the dust and grit and hair that clog the place…”
Later in the same book by Davey, she talks about how Songtag refers to photographs as memento mori and as an “inventory of mortality.” Which is something that I thought about while taking the above photos. It was Sunday morning, and I’d returned from taking some photos of downtown buildings. Our fridge was one big white and empty box. So in between editing photos, I ordered groceries online. I’ve been ordering online for the last month and having them delivered which isn’t something I would have imagined myself doing. But I needed to find strategies to remain calm and this is one on the list I made when I’d hit the pandemic wall. It helps, is the thing. I go out to work three times a week, and so I can usually make that my only real contact with other humans. This probably makes me sound more fastidious or paranoid than I really am, though now is not the time to relax either, is it?
Long story short. I ordered my groceries and they arrived on my front step only a couple of hours later. Is not that a small miracle? A privileged one, for sure, but what a lovely relief. I unpacked my vegetables, and began “managing” them. What needs to be eaten first, what needs to go in the fridge, what needs to be chopped up. I have the whole week planned out with them, you know? As one does. We are all in some ways, I imagine, captive to the contents of our fridge. The goal is to not waste anything, to time it so we don’t have to shop for another 10 days, to save a few good things for near the end so it feels like we’re not eating strictly out of tins.
The still life this weeks feels very personal and of this time — though all it is is my groceries. It feels naked in the way it felt revealing when I posted a photograph of the inside of my fridge. I suppose if I’d been thinking, I would have added the tins of chickpeas and boxes of pasta, the croissants I accidentally ordered too many of, the tube of tomato paste, the orange juice, and the eggs. I would have included the bag of spinach and the frozen corn and packet of bacon. You could have spent time wondering what recipes I had in mind.
It seems to me that this is another interesting aspect of the ordinary life in this time: the way we’re managing it, the way we’re chewing our way through it, over and again, and it’s sort of the background music that we don’t pay attention to all that much, even though it’s also central to our existence. The shifting of this box in the pantry, and that one, and the way we make sure the new milk carton is behind the one with a bit left in it from last week. The new eggs, below the older ones.
At the beginning of the pandemic, there was more worry about surfaces, though now we know it’s much less of a concern, or only as much as a concern as it ever was. We crave human touch, and yet, we’ve been conditioned to be wary of it. Even just the thought of someone touching our produce feels different these days.
The way we manage our fridge is the way we manage our lives during this pandemic, in some sense. We move, we shift, we hope for open space, we hope for replenishment, we slowly move through our abundance, we come to the end of the abundance, and if we’re lucky it begins all over again. The fridge empties and fills, we make what we can of the ingredients, whatever it was that was available the day we went to the store. We stretch things out, we make them last, or we binge on ice cream, and eat all the chips in one sitting. We get creative. And sometimes it feels like a five star restaurant, and sometimes it’s hotdogs and McCain’s french fries or a tin of beans on toast.
I can’t help but hope that if we can dig our way out of our fridges, we can dig our way out of this pandemic. Spaces will open and become more defined. We will empty out, so that we can fill again in new and smarter and more creative ways.
