Rotten Food Just Tastes Better
Although some would certainly kick up a fuss if you tried to take away their Sub-Zeros with built-in televisions and icemakers, there are others who believe that a big ol’ refrigerator doesn’t necessarily lead to delicious dining.
British food writer Tim Hayward, blogging in the Guardian, asks whether we’re “Too Chilled Out?” In the fridge, foods hang in a state of suspended animation, unable to ripen or age in the same way they did when they were stored in larders, pantries, or root cellars, as in previous centuries. These processes develop complex flavors in a way slinging your stuff into the refrigerator just can’t. Notes Hayward:
Lovers of food are half in love with putrescence. Most things worth eating are at the very edge of decay or, without wishing to come over all French about it, redolent, in some way, of death. Suspending the process, stopping those enzymes working, killing the blooms, slowing the bacterial development seems to be just one more industrial process coming between us and culinary perfection.
So what should you refrigerate? Hayward’s companion piece in the Guardian’s food section, handily titled “What Should Go in Your Fridge?,” can get you started.
Meanwhile, Jonathan on the Wasted Food blog wonders if our love affair with large-capacity fridges leads to thrown-away food. “[N]obody likes an empty ‘fridge. I would guess that a great deal of food waste comes because we feel the need to keep our refrigerators stocked.”
For myself, I love looking at an empty fridge. A packed-to-capacity refrigerator makes me feel like the vegetables are a ticking time bomb ready to go slimy at any second.
Posted by
| Thursday, April 10, 2008 at 11:01am
| 2 comments
Tagged with: fridge, refrigerator, sub-zero, wasted food, guardian, tim hayward
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I deliberately have a tiny (countersized) fridge, as an "American" sized one means ridiculous wastage for a single person. But I live ten minutes' walk from the largest farmers' market in Montréal, and several other interesting food shops.
An empty fridge speaks to me of dire poverty, as I'm sure it does for many people who've been there, especially in childhood.
It depends heavily on what you put in there. Most of what goes in my fridge is leftovers, meat, condiments, milk, beverages, etc. In general things that ought to be kept cold.
Cheese, though I acknowledge the controversy, is kept in the fridge, but even there I have yet to find a way to keep it from going either hard or moldy within a week or so.
A big part of the issue though is that it simply isn't even remotely feasible for the majority of people to not put things in their fridges. A vast number of people do not live anywhere where they can reasonably go to the grocery store on a daily basis. Even less if you're talking about farmer's markets which are often not only weekly, but far fewer in number.
I consider myself lucky that there's a grocery store where I can buy a few items, typically only produce and some meat as it is an Asian store, at the end of my block. If I needed to get into my car (or even worse, spend the average of an hour each way to take public transit), drive to the store, find what I want and bring it home I don't think it would be possible to cook every day. Definitely not if you have any designs on holding down a job and doing anything else with your evening.
Likewise even if you try to eliminate using a fridge at home it's going to be more or less impossible to maintain that your grocer is not refrigerating it.
Finally, it comes to a matter of price. Much like most people cannot afford to eat nothing but organic, free-range, humane food the increase in costs to eat only fresh food isn't something that most people are going to be able to bear in our current society.
The point is not to get carried away with it. I doubt most people here are eating little more than packaged food (though glancing into people's carts at Trader Joe's you'd think nobody was even aware that cooking exists) and past that what are you really refrigerating that can't handle it (I'm pretty sure that my pickles, jams, and soda are all doing fine)? I couldn't make do with a small fridge and my pantry is pretty meekly stocked, but I'm certainly not the proprietor of a food mausoleum.
An empty fridge? Meh. I just reminds me that I need to go shopping. All a full fridge makes me think of is that I probably got back from the grocery store or I have a bunch of leftovers.