It is high summer, a time when many of us are forced to face up to a deeply unpalatable truth: that, when it comes to food, we are nothing more than slatterns. For this is the one time of the year when, in preparation for going on holiday, we can be guaranteed to clean the fridge. And I mean clean it properly. Of course, there will be people rolling their eyes at this; the ones who clean their fridge weekly and keep a pack of wet wipes to hand for whenever they have to touch door handles or stroke their children’s hair.
Everyone else will be nodding in recognition. As a warm-up for the food panel show I present for BBC Radio 4, I often ask audiences how often they clean their fridge. (Oh yeah, I know how to entertain.) The number that say it’s every week can be counted on the fingers of one hand after that hand has been through an industrial accident. For the rest the deep cleanse really is just a once a year job.
I understand why this is – because I am one of them. I mean to do better, but it doesn’t quite happen. The fridge is a big white box. White means clean. It’s also cold in there and cold means fresh. That’s the point of the fridge, isn’t it? It’s a fridge ergo it’s clean and fresh. And then we prepare to go away on holiday and we spot the half-finished bottle of milk and we know instinctively what we must do. We start to unload and are brought face to face with our own quietly liquefying shame.
The mouldering vegetal matter we didn’t get round to using, the turnips the organic veg box merchants insist on stuffing in the bottom to make up the numbers, are only part of the story. There are the multitudinous jars, the ones people gave you out of generosity or hate, the ones you bought because you forgot about the others you already had. The “good idea at the time” jars. Gingerly you unscrew the lids to find so much furry mould you don’t know whether to spoon it into the bin, or comb it. Embarrassment over food waste mingles with self-disgust.
Suddenly you realise that your fridge, far from being fresh and clean, is festering with life; that it now contains more vibrant culture than your local library. You spot the other jars, their lids jammed in place by clots of suppurating matter that have dribbled themselves all over the lump of Pyrenean cheese you once had a now long-forgotten plan for.
We like to think of ourselves as health and safety conscious. Whenever a well-renowned restaurant fails its hygiene test, flunks its scores on the doors, we share the news gleefully. And yet, in truth, most domestic fridges would fail too. Even at their cleanest we casually stack raw meat above cooked and omit to check it’s humming at below 5C. And at its worst? Hieronymus Bosch wouldn’t have the imagination with which to depict the horror of hidden mould and contagion. The one we are confronted with every year at this time. So we knuckle down, pull out the shelves, swab the interior and promise ourselves that when we return from holiday it will be a new start. Which it won’t be. Because it never is. But hey, it’s the thought that counts. I just hope the holiday was worth it.
