Amy Lu's View

Our new refrigerator* is almost a couple of weeks old. 

This time with our new refrigerator has been wonderful. Not only is it lovely to have a working refrigerator so that I can eat fresh vegetables and yogurt and eggs without worrying obsessively about food poisoning, but it feels luxurious because we have so much space. 

Getting to this place of new refrigerator ownership was not wonderful, mostly because we had to clean out the old refrigerator/freezer. This process was annoying, time-consuming, embarrassing, and depressing. 

This was an endeavor beyond the initial “I’m freaking out and throwing most of our groceries away because they’ve been improperly refrigerated” clean-out. (That was dispiriting and stressful in its own way but very different). This was the “Now we need to clear out the dregs of food stuff that has been hiding in here for years” phase. 

The freezer required the most attention. It was a monument to broken dreams and promises, a repository of the remnants of past aspirations. And while I wasn’t necessarily scared of or averse to eating old freezer-burned food (I’ve been pleasantly surprised in the past with how a frozen offering can be resurrected with microwaving) it seemed like a good time to declutter. If something had been lingering in our freezer for years and years (some of the “best buy” dates were 2014) did I really need to hang on to it, much less go through the effort of transporting it to our new freezer?

There’s almost always something at least a little sad to me about uneaten food–it represents a plan gone awry, and is a tangible artifact symbolizing an error in judgment. But maybe it can also mean a welcome change of mind and/or heart, a course correction, or a fresh start. 

We have a chance for a fresh start now, at least in terms of food purchasing and storage. And I am going to try hard from now on to only buy food that we will actually eat within a reasonable amount of time. Food waste is not only a problem for the environment–having an overstuffed, disorganzied refrigerator and freezer weighs on the mind and soul. 

(I can also learn from my mother here–after she died and we were cleaning out her kitchen, we discovered at least 40 boxes of stockpiled jello. She wasn’t particularly attached to jello–any more than any white midwestern Lutheran woman of her time–but she stored it in a hard to reach cupboard and I think it was always easier to buy more than to remember and retrieve what she already had. And while there are many qualities of my mom that I want to emulate, weirdly building up an archive of food isn’t one of them). 

I wrote earlier in this post that the clean-out process was embarrassing, but I think “humbling” is a better way to think of it. We can’t always know or control how life is going to go, and the hidden and forgotten curiosities in our freezer are a testament to that. 

Ah, perhaps it’s most helpful to approach this experience with a curiousity mindset: Why did I buy that? Why didn’t we ever eat it? 

And perhaps most importantly, and entertainingly, what in the hell is that under all that ice?

*Our new refrigerator is a white top-mount Whirlpool, in case you’re interested. I made Chad pick it out–I was happy with anything that fit in the space that we didn’t have to wait too long to have delivered.