Ode to our Small Fridge

Have you ever seen our fridge in State College?  It's huge.  And we have an extra freezer in the garage where John surreptitiously stores half cows and whole sheep that he gets from the meats lab.  Our fridge in England is small.  It is sized for Anna.

Refrigerators here are generally smaller, though the variation in size is huge.  I've been to Michael and Anna's friends' houses with fridges as big as a standard American one.  But lots of people have these little ones, which has all sorts of implications for household behavior, purchase patterns, packaging, location of storage, one's relationship with food, consciousness of overbuying.

Eggs, bread, peanut butter-- those don't go in the fridge.  We'd either lose them or they take up too much space.  (Eggs are not refrigerated here.)

Being just the right size, Anna looks in the fridge pretty much every afternoon for a snack.  She even bends down slightly to grab a yogurt.  It's a nice independent task she can do.  Most kids can't open the wide swinging door of our US fridge, and most of the food is really high up since we have a big freezer on the bottom.  Anna will have to start weight lifting and learn to ride a pogo stick when we return to America.  Being oversized for our England fridge, I tend not to just open it and stare at the contents for a snack like I would in the US.  I might herniate a disc.

Packaging is definitely slimmer (e.g., sodas bottles are very tall and thin) and smaller (family sized yogurt is done in one sitting).  The fact that we have to pause and rebuy probably makes us skinnier.  Or perhaps we start mirroring our packaging?  How about that.  If the food is big, we are big.  If the food is small, we are small.  We are what we eat.

While shopping, "stocking up" just doesn't come into play unless it's a non-refrigerated item I can shove somewhere and remember it later.  I buy milk and yogurt all the time because I pretty much replenish as we consume-- a form of just in time consumption.  We are very lucky to have shops in the Lower Village, so popping out for basics can be done in no time.  (I will miss that.)

On a related tangent, I noticed that stores here run out of items more often than in the US.  Yes, occasionally I'd go to Wegmans and be miffed that they are out of basil, but I've been out of luck on spinach, eggplant, apples, Pudsey supplies needed for school, Christmas items.  I don't think it's that the inventory system is all that faulty here; I think it's just a different value system.   Less about waste and more about rationing, patience and coping.  Just like in the fridge, we may run out of something but we can get it tomorrow.