Fridges – chilled receptacle used to keep food at its best for a bit longer. Fridges can be seen as a mirror of their owners, with each shelf being assigned to a messy, frugal or absent housemate. With the latest reports from Tesco that over half of bagged salad and apples are thrown away by its consumers, Vision writers finally confess the state of their fridges.
Adrian Horan: BEHOLD, the frozen wasteland of an off-campus first year. You can tell a lot about a man from the contents of his fridge, and I think this just about sums me up. Well, as the decent all-rounder I want you to think I am. My fridge only looks like this wonderful hierarchy post-ASDA delivery; but before that, it looked like something I’d cultured on a petri-dish and baked in the sun… Seriously, my salad had its own watery preservative and I felt self-conscious as my food seemed to grow more hair than I ever could. My binman’s in for a treat!
Doris Xu: One of my housemates, who is from China, told me that in order to take up more space in fridge, she tried to be the first one to move into the house. It’s easy to find bags of vegetables like carrots and potatoes with drops of water inside the packaging in the fridge. In fact, for most vegetables, the most suitable time is within three days. At its worst, the fridge becomes a place to only store leftovers. Opening the door, piles of big containers appear in sight. Another housemate said, “I will cook food every Sunday for the following whole week, so I only take out some from container and then microwave it.” In the battle of seizing fridge space, no one is winner. Those who store vegetables for weeks and for the ones who cook food for a whole week may suffer from chronic gastroenteritis as a consequence.
Pippa Driver: I live in a flat of eight and, with only one fridge between us, I have been forced to start some sort of farm shop in my room. One of my shelves now contains an assortment of onions, potatoes, apples (bought in bulk from Aldi), three courgettes and a lettuce, all of which are exposed to the varying temperature of my bed – window open at night, radiator cranked up full in the day. This has resulted in mould and discolouration, yet I refuse to throw any of them away. I have never heard of someone dying due to the consumption of a rotting vegetable; although this might have something to do with the persistence of my Fresher’s Flu.
Morenike Adebayo: As I’m currently winning the award for Housemate Least Likely To Be At Home, you would think that my section of the fridge would be meagre or at least overrun by the foods of other housemates asserting their dominance over unclaimed lands. You’d be wrong. Nestled next to the 1kg bag of slowly decaying spinach (that I’ve started so I’ll finish) is a bunch of wilting spring onions. They were bought for a recipe but, as I’m a maverick with recipes, they were substituted and then forgotten about. While I’m certain that I will eat the spinach and the spring onions, the plastic box of furry pineapple slices should be thrown out. Or, if the juice doesn’t eat its way through the plastic, I might keep it as an experiment over this year.