For around four years, I’ve been following a thread on Reddit called Fridge Detectives, where people from all over the world post images of the inside of their fridges for the followers to examine, and it is a gift that keeps giving. It satiates my sick curiosity that riddles the lives of most writers: to glimpse the inner contents of other people’s lives. I try to place a short, squat fridge with mostly condiments on its outer rim and other well preserved substances in jars as belonging to a single man in New York. I think I’ve identified a household of young professionals living in London by the multitude of opened plant-based milk cartons (soy, oat, almond, calcium-fortified unsweetened chocolate sesame — each to their own). There’s a nuclear family with a 2.27L Tropicana orange juice (no bits) and a trusted system of labelled Tupperware.
I inspect the contents of my own fridge in that scraping-the-barrel-at-the-end-of-the-week way.
Who am I, today?
A lonely parsley leaf clings to the back wall, insinuating that my claim to the status of a fully functional adult is just short of delusional, whilst the bunch it detached from suggests I live within a walking distance from a convenience store run by generous, warm-blooded people who, too, view fresh herbs not as garnish but as the star of the show. The opened smetana and a couple of small plump cucumbers, (not the long plastic-wrapped phalli from Tesco), point to another Slavic institution in the vicinity — Polski Sklep.
In other words, it’ Friday, I’m lazy, so I scrape the mould of the batchelor shiitake to fry with the flaccid left-over leak and an egg before hitting a local establishment.
Maya Gulieva is a writer, artist and educator living in London. She was born in Moscow. You can find her on instagram here.