The Cold Truth: You Are What You Refrigerate

Getting a new refrigerator forces you to confront who you are, who you were and who you wish to be.

No other appliance plays so central a role in the way you play out your life. A stove is a stove is a stove, even though it may be grimy inside and out. A washing machine takes on no signs of ownership.

But a refrigerator symbolizes your personality. It displays for anyone who dares to look the true condition of your soul.

I spent one bleak morning cleaning out our old defunct refrigerator, emptying all its contents onto the kitchen counters, examining each jar and plastic bag and frozen plastic tub of unidentifiable mush.

My stepkids tease us for having a fridge full of food, but nothing to eat. Mustards. Jams. Spicy sauces. Exotic oils.

That morning, I had to accept that they are right. I counted 18 mustards, many quite odd (lemon and dill mustard, for example), some quite expensive, as mustards go, and all unnecessary since we are, at heart, mustard fans who sometimes indulge in Dijon.

We have jams with no added sugar that we bought during fits of guilt about our diets. We have jams from France, bought in the dead of winter when our lives seemed drab and gray. We have jars from boutique jammeries, all of them half-eaten, slightly moldy on top.

I threw out most of the jams, and mustards, too, and the walnut oil (labeled huile de noix) that I last used years ago, during my pretentious cooking phase, and the greasy bottles of hot sauce whose labels had fallen off.

I threw out heavy plastic sacks of 2-year-old whole-wheat flour and enough yeast to bake 100 loaves of bread. I bought it when I intended to bake a loaf or two a week.

I never did.

I also threw out the wheat germ, in a big plastic yogurt container labeled wheat germ in black magic marker. I bought it in bulk the year I left San Francisco, which was 1983. I cannot explain why I have not thrown it out before this except that I couldn’t believe it would have gone bad, and certainly thought I might have need for it, since I would like to bake more healthy things, and I know how healthy wheat germ is, especially when it’s fresh.

Might I win the prize for the oldest refrigerated item in America? Once the fridge was empty, I had to clean off its metal skin, to which clung 20 magnets holding up old photos of friends’ children, some of whom I’ve never met.

Also: Outdated coupons curled at the edges, a chart about cooking beans and a minireview of a restaurant that has closed.

Nothing seems colder than throwing away photos of children, even ones you don’t know, so I piled them up and shoved them into a shoe box already bulging with pictures of those same children a few years younger.

I threw out the old coupons, the reviews, the charts I never used, the care instructions for a white amaryllis that died during the winter.

Burly men removed the old refrigerator and wheeled in a shiny new one that will allow us to start again. Its shelves are empty. Its skin is unmarked. Its bottom bins are clear plastic, so that you can, presumably, see your produce rotting and discard it long before it begins to smell up the whole mechanism.

With this new refrigerator, we can become new people.

But the truth is: We will not.