We dutifully and happily do our farmer’s market shopping trip at least once, if not twice a week. We eat what we can eat in a day or so and put the rest in the refrigerator. What we didn’t eat co-habitates with everyday perishables like milk, eggs, butter, and refrigerator elders like half-used condiments and ‘rescue’ bread and crackers (‘rescued’ that is before furry molds threatens their usable life) and gifted and uneaten small cakes or jars of locally made half eaten jams. Whatever we put inside our big electric rectangle is automatically sent into battle, in a Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ fighting with others for space, nudging aside big containers of sentimentally held yogurt, cheese, tofu and kefirs that no longer even pass the ‘it’s probably OK’ sniff test.

I would love to hear this war once the refrigerator doors are closed. Old occupants aligning with each other against the ‘newcomers’. Salsa threatening to spill their heat on leftover brownies. “We’ll see how you like a little red sauce, buster!”
In the ‘old days’ this Tokyo subway rush hour jam wouldn’t have happened. Ice boxes (I still call our refrigerator an ice box!) were smaller, much smaller and were cooled by big blocks of ice, ‘farmed’ from nearby ponds or later created in ice houses. With the invention of the home refrigerator in 1913, all of this changed…shopping choices, store sizes, the famous or infamous leftover meals…oh and TV dinners.

As we enter into the heat of summer, here’s a good article about about the refrigerator’s invention that might, if nothing else, inspire you to get rid of that slimy, now unrecognizable leaf in the vegetable cabinet and to clean that unidentifiable brown slime from the bottom ‘fridge’ ‘floor’.

- Marc Levitt, Host & Co-Executive Producer