Five Fridges and a Freezer
The fridges of ‘other people’ contain secrets to a universe in human behavioural form. They have an ability to reveal, celebrate and shame in ways that cut across cultures, genders, income groups, degrees of celebrity, political leaning and geographic situation.
There are publications devoted to fridges and their contents across a wide range of media – spilling the beans on what these chill spaces have to say about those responsible for filling them. It may be hard to imagine the appeal in the abstract but it’s almost impossible not to love the humanity and humour in the detail.
The Paris Review once took a literal peek inside the fridges of a literary crowd, in its ‘Writers’ Fridges’ blog, sharing photographic evidence of the contents of real-life writers’ fridges as “snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently”.
Here we learn that Sloane Crosley’s fridge may be “where hope goes to die” and take-out boxes to “keep secrets”. Leslie Jamison admits that “good intentions and disorder” crowd her shelves, but adds the (valid) disclaimer that: “any discussion of my fridge … needs to begin with a discussion of who lives in my home” – a caveat that cannot be stressed too heavily for many of us.
Etgar Keret remains cooly distant from a fridge he’s never learned to love: “to this day I pass before [its] doors like a priest in the temple passing in front of the holy ark, knowing its hidden secrets will never be mine”, while Walter Mosley is rendered contemplative by the exposure of his (hard to hide) ostrich egg, an opportunistic impulse buy from WholeFoods three years earlier: “my refrigerator, I now realize, has a past with little concern for the future. It could be a writer.”
If the writers featured here are anything to go by, the literati are fond of a fridge that wears its heart on its door front – where novelty magnets and letter shapes (re-arrangeable at will) hold together souvenirs of travel and good times, old auras and new babies – to create a picture of life as it “should be”, as it might be, and as it once was.
In other parts of the web ‘Fridge Detectives’ can be found in a sublet space on Reddit, providing a daily joyride through an anonymity of ‘cold cases’ – should you have the time to stop and solve them – where willing victims post pictures of the inside of their fridges and invite all those passing to deduce “who am I?”. Come for the lols, but stay for the insights, the insults, and the intuition and, of course, to test your own anthropological acumen.
There are glossy books devoted to chefs and their fridges, and ‘oldest fridges in the land’ discovered by the Mail in the Scottish castles of former monarchs. God Bless HRH the erstwhile Queen Mother and her 1954 Frigidaire, standing proud at 5’8” in its stockinged feet – although maybe a little taller on its ‘stilts’ since some new-fangled underfloor heating started to mess with its temperature regulation in the year of our Lord, 2000 – and still hard at work in the Castle of Mey.
There are the fridges of the famous that can spark a journalist to action for no good reason whatsoever (Hello! David Beckham – no links when it’s clickbait!). An ‘urgent’ feature, with an origin story in a screenshot from an Instagram reel, reveals only that David owns a big fridge (the jury’s out on ‘biggest-ever’), behind a big, blue, blurrily bisected door, and perhaps also a freezer, in a home that he inhabits only some of the time – a nothingburger of a story we can file under ‘journalistic desperation’.
'blink and you might miss em' screenshots of @davidbeckham in “sprawling Cotswolds kitchen” opening the door on a fridge claimed to be the “biggest you’ve ever seen!" – 🙄
a selection of headlines, from 2002 (left and above)
Gone but not forgotten: sale headline, 2005, all previous rumours: ‘hotly denied’
And talking of freezers, there is the fridge-adjacent one, perhaps once owned by Charles Saatchi, in which Mark Quinn’s frozen sculpture of his own head, made with 9 pints (or thereabouts) of his own blood, entitled “Self”, is said to have melted down when the builders responsible for Nigella’s new kitchen unplugged the freezer in which this importantly expressive, and expensive, work of art was housed. The rumours may or may not have been true, the sculpture may or may not have been repairable, and whether the sculpture itself, in all its bloody detail, is to your taste (I know it’s not to mine, and that Charles Saatchi, perhaps tellingly, eventually sold whatever might have remained of it), the story remains deliciously, if also apocryphally, and appallingly, appealing.
Yolanda inside her fridge, sourcing ‘pure’ water (natch)
when life gives you lemons
And of course, there is the ‘bombshell’, the fridge to end them all: the fabulous floor-to-ceiling, walk-in, glass-slipper of a fridge – the fairy-tale model – once a feature of Yolanda Hadid’s home when she was a Malibu based Housewife hanging out on the Beverly Hills arm of a reality TV station. If you believe the hype, it’s the most famous fridge that was ever dreamed into existence, at least by Yolanda, who brought it to real life. It’s the fridge with enough transformative power to host its own social media account: @YolandasFridge, dedicated to a fridge living its best life, and holding court as cheerleader for the triumphs, and regretter of the trials, of Yolanda and her then husband, David Foster.
In its heyday this was a fridge that could photo-bomb an A list model, dress up as a microwave on Halloween (and post a picture of its costume), host Lisa Rinna and other celebrity types within its doors, and use its platform to take on politically charged figures in appliance-related culture wars. This was a fridge that knew the secret of staying cool on the inside while making a full-frontal exhibition of itself.
fridge for scale
Halloween costume
a reach for the stars
Sadly, it’s a fridge whose glass heart may also have shattered into a thousand perfectly broken shards when Yolanda, and her baskets filled with lemons, had to walk out of its life. We might never know what happened to Yolanda’s showboat of a fridge, but its interior light maybe shone too bright to keep on keeping-it-real for those with less unreal lives. Whatever its fate, long may it rest in power🔌🍋