SUNDAY WITH PHILOSOPHY JANE | The Refrigerator Is Full, But There’s Nothing To Eat

At 12:43 on a perfectly ordinary Saturday afternoon, I opened my refrigerator and discovered there was nothing to eat.

This was troubling because the refrigerator was full. Not reasonably full, and not modestly stocked. It was full enough that getting the orange juice out meant moving a container of leftover chicken, two yogurts, half a watermelon, a carton of eggs, a package of sliced cheese, three bottles of salad dressing, and something wrapped in aluminum foil whose identity felt like a government secret.

There was food everywhere. I could see it. I had bought most of it myself less than forty-eight hours earlier during a grocery trip, expensive enough that I almost asked the cashier if I could set up a monthly payment plan.

Still, after standing in front of all this food for about thirty seconds, I came to the only conclusion that made sense to me right then. There was absolutely nothing to eat.

I closed the refrigerator.

Four minutes later, I opened it again.

I'm not sure what I thought had happened in those four minutes. Nobody was watching the refrigerator, so maybe I hoped the chicken had turned itself into tacos. Maybe the eggs had figured out a plan. Maybe the cheese had taken some initiative.

Nothing had changed. Same chicken. Same eggs. Same yogurt. The mystery foil package was still sitting there under investigation.

I nudged the milk slightly to the left. Nothing. I moved it back. Still nothing.

Then I closed the door and walked away, deeply disappointed in an appliance that had done the exact job I bought it to do.

The Second Inspection

I'm starting to think that opening a refrigerator over and over isn't really about finding food. It's just plain optimism.

The first inspection gives you the facts. The second inspection argues with them. Surely, you think, there must be something in here I missed forty seconds ago.

So we don't just open the refrigerator. We investigate it.

We lean in. We move things around. We crouch down. We stare into the back corners. Sometimes we put one hand on our hip, which doesn't help the search at all, but it makes us look like we're in charge of the operation.

I did all of those moves.

There was a container on the second shelf. I opened it up. Spaghetti. I knew it was spaghetti because I put it in the container myself the night before. Still, I looked. Apparently I thought leftovers could change jobs overnight. They hadn't. They were still spaghetti. I closed the lid and put it right back in the same spot.

Next came the yogurt. I picked it up, read the label, and checked the date. Perfectly good. I didn't want yogurt. Back it went.

I checked the cheese. Nothing. Turkey. Nothing. Eggs. Too much work. Carrots. Let's be serious.

I shut the refrigerator again.

Three minutes later, I was back.

At this point, I want to be clear that I hadn't gotten any hungrier. I was just more convinced that the refrigerator was hiding things from me.

The Condiment Industrial Complex

Every refrigerator eventually builds up an area that is basically administrative storage. Mine is in the door.

That door holds about twenty-seven different items designed to make real food taste better, even while I stand there insisting we don't have any food.

Mustard. Another mustard. A third mustard bought because the first two apparently weren't cutting it anymore. Ketchup. Mayonnaise. Hot sauce. Soy sauce. Barbecue sauce. Salad dressing. A second salad dressing. A bottle holding about a teaspoon of dressing that nobody will throw away because we might need it in an emergency.

There are pickles. There are olives. There's something labeled "sweet chili." There's a jar I don't remember buying and am now a little afraid to look inside.

If condiments counted as actual meals, I could run a small diner. Unfortunately, nobody has ever opened a refrigerator at noon, looked at seventeen bottles of sauce, and said, "Great, I'll have mustard."

So I closed the door.

Then I opened it again.

I know this is getting hard to defend.

The Produce Drawer of Good Intentions

The bottom drawer is where good intentions go when they're on their last legs.

Everything in that drawer entered the house with big plans. Spinach comes home with goals. Celery comes home with ambition. Bell peppers show up thinking they've joined a healthy family. Cilantro arrives expecting to do important work.

For the first day or two, everybody is excited. "We're going to eat better this week." That sentence has probably ruined more vegetables than anything else people say.

By Wednesday, the spinach starts looking nervous. By Thursday, the cilantro has seen better days. By Friday, a cucumber has gone soft in ways nature never intended.

I opened the drawer. There they were. A bag of baby carrots looked up at me like tired office workers who realized they're never getting that promotion.

I closed the drawer. I was hungry, not desperate.

Then I saw an avocado. That brought up a whole different problem.

An avocado keeps its own schedule. For six days straight, it feels like a baseball. Then, for about eleven minutes on Thursday afternoon, it is completely perfect. If you happen to be at work during those eleven minutes, that's it. By dinner time, the avocado has retired.

I gave mine a gentle squeeze. It didn't give anything away. I put it back in the drawer so it could keep its private plans to itself.

"What Are You Looking For?"

Eventually, someone walked into the kitchen and caught me standing in front of the refrigerator again.

"What are you looking for?" they asked.

That's an unfair question. It assumes I have a plan.

"I don't know," I said.

They looked over my shoulder into the refrigerator.

"There's chicken." "I know." "Turkey." "I saw it." "Eggs." "I don't want eggs." "There's spaghetti." "I had that yesterday." "Yogurt." "Not in the mood for yogurt." "Cheese." "Cheese isn't lunch."

There was a pause. I could tell my argument was falling apart.

"So there's food," they said.

Technically, yes. But they weren't seeing the real problem.

"There's nothing I want."

And there it was. The real truth finally came out.

It was never true that there was nothing to eat. There was just nothing I wanted to eat. Those are two very different things, even if we use the exact same words for both.

That realization should have finished things off. Instead, I opened the refrigerator again.

Leftovers in Witness Protection

Now my attention went back to that aluminum foil package.

Every refrigerator has at least one object where nobody remembers the backstory. Nobody wants to throw it out because it might still be fine. Nobody wants to eat it because nobody knows what it is. So it sits there, day after day, taking up good shelf space.

I pulled it out. The weight felt solid enough, but the shape was a mystery. I peeled back a corner of the foil.

A piece of chicken. Not the newer chicken, but older chicken.

I tried to work out the timeline. Thursday? Wednesday? Was this from the night before we had the spaghetti?

I was standing there holding piece of my own recent life, and I couldn't even tell you when it got there.

Leftovers go through very clear stages:

1. First night, they're dinner.
2. Second day, they're lunch.
3. Third day, they're "still good."
4. Fourth day, someone asks, "Whose is this?"
5. Fifth day, nobody claims them without a lawyer present.

Eventually the plastic container just becomes part of the fridge. People stop seeing it as food and start seeing it as furniture.

I wrapped the chicken back up. I wish I could say I tossed it in the trash, but I didn't. I put it back on the shelf. I guess I wanted to give future Jane a turn to make the exact same choice.

Closet Rules, Kitchen Rules

Standing there, I realized the refrigerator isn't the only place we do this.

We stand in front of closets stuffed with clothes and complain that we have nothing to wear. That's pretty impressive considering the closet is so packed that opening the door is a safety hazard.

There are shirts, pants, jackets, an outfit bought for one specific party three years ago, and something with the tags still on because its time hasn't come yet.

And still we say, "There's nothing to wear."

TV is the exact same story. There used to be four channels, and you had to walk across the room to turn the dial. Now you can watch thousands of movies, shows, and documentaries whenever you want.

We spend twenty-five minutes clicking through the menus and say, "There's nothing on."

Nothing? There are thousands of things on. What we really mean is that none of those choices gives us the exact feeling we were hoping for when we sat down.

The refrigerator works the same way. It isn't empty. It just didn't read our minds.

Grocery-Store Jane vs. Actual Jane

There's another reason my behavior is hard to defend. I was right there when the food came into the house. I picked it out. Nobody forced the yogurt on me.

I stood in the store surrounded by thousands of items and put that yogurt in my cart on purpose. At the time, I must have thought Saturday Jane was going to be thrilled.

Saturday Jane had other ideas.

This is the weird deal we make with ourselves. Grocery-Store Jane is responsible. She buys vegetables, reads nutrition labels, and sees a bag of spinach while picturing a week of nice salads made in a clean kitchen.

Then Actual Jane comes home on Thursday night and just wants something with melted cheese.

Those two women have never met, but one keeps shopping for the other. That's how refrigerators turn into little museums of things we meant to do.

Every shelf has proof of someone we briefly planned to be:

• The person who eats more fruit.
• The person who packs a lunch instead of buying one.
• The person who needed three sprigs of parsley for one recipe and came home with enough to landscape the yard.

I looked at the produce drawer again. The carrots didn't say anything, and they didn't need to.

The Problem With Plenty

Abundance does strange things to us. You'd think having more choices would make deciding easier, but it usually does the opposite.

When you have two things in the house, lunch is a quick choice. When you have thirty things, lunch becomes a project.

Chicken could be a sandwich. Eggs could be an omelet. Turkey could be a wrap. Vegetables could be a salad. The spaghetti could be warmed up. The yogurt needs no prep at all, which somehow made me want it even less.

Every option was completely fine, and that was the problem. I wasn't looking for fine. I was waiting for one option to jump out and look amazing.

Nothing did. The refrigerator kept running. It did its job, and I was the one complaining.

Around my sixth time looking inside, I started to get it. Saying "there's nothing" usually has very little to do with what's actually on the shelf.

Sometimes it just means nothing matches the picture in our head. Nothing feels exciting or new or quite right. That's a very different kind of empty.

The Seventh Opening

Late in the afternoon, real hunger finally beat out my imagination. I went back to the refrigerator one more time.

At this point, the appliance and I had been working on this relationship for hours, and neither of us had learned a thing.

I opened the door. The light clicked on.

Same chicken. Same turkey. Same eggs. Same cheese. Same yogurt. The spaghetti hadn't changed into anything else. The mustard was still taking up space, and the carrots were still sitting there waiting for directions.

So I grabbed the spaghetti. I put it in a bowl, heated it up, and sat down at the table.

And it was good. Not just okay, but actually good.

I had spent most of the afternoon turning down a perfectly fine lunch because it wasn't whatever magic meal I hoped would appear between the milk and the orange juice.

It's funny how often we do that. How often do we ignore what we have because we're thinking about what we don't have?

I'm not saying we should stop wanting good things, or act like every leftover is a feast. Sometimes the fridge really is empty. Sometimes the choices are terrible. Sometimes the yogurt expired two years ago and needs to be thrown out immediately.

But sometimes we have plenty. We just aren't in the mood for any of it. That feels like a good thing to realize, if only to keep us honest. There's a real difference between needing something and just not feeling excited by what's right in front of us.

I finished the spaghetti, washed the bowl, and put it away. For about twenty minutes, I felt pretty wise.

Then, later that evening, I walked through the kitchen. I wasn't hungry, I didn't plan on eating anything, and I wasn't even thinking about food.

I stopped anyway. I opened the refrigerator door and stared inside.

Same yogurt.

I don't know what I thought had happened to it, but I gave it another look anyway.

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