When people come over to my apartment and pop in my refrigerator to grab a beer, I like to warn them that I’m a “food saver.” My longtime partner and I have packed our reasonably sized fridge with jars of pickle juice and whey; kumquat solids preserved in sugar, leftover from his time as a bartender; XO sauce, fermented crab paste, and lemon pickle made Kerala-style by my stepmother. Below, the freezer has taken on a different role, holding homemade dishes cooked by my grandmother who passed away in 2020; the last of her presence on Earth marked by carefully labeled Ziplocks of spinach dal and spicy chickpea chole. We call it “the treasure chest,” a wealth I can’t seem to bring myself to enjoy. In some ways, preserving foods has become a way for me to keep people alive—and not just those who have died. I’m convinced that keeping the juices from macerated peaches can somehow Frankenstein my “summer self” when the winter comes.

This way of living may sound romantic, but it lends itself to disorganization. Sure, everything is in a deli container—a line of blue painter’s tape with “peach juice 6/4/24” scrawled in Sharpie to remind us of its provenance—yet I struggle to find the mustard. Friends are afraid when removing the beer, fearful of knocking over a precarious spice tower. So when I explored “home organization” on TikTok and stumbled upon “fridgescaping,” I was intrigued. The trend encourages one to create a detailed and bountiful display of refrigerated foods using decorative bowls and baskets, fresh flowers, trinkets, and even string lights. By “intrigued,” I mean, “equal parts thrilled and repulsed.”

Fridgescaping is a new phase of Tidycore inspired by Konmari-ing your life. Food clutter is addressed through an abundance of aesthetic; you ask only if your crusty jar of sriracha sparks joy visually, ignoring the fact that it makes everything you eat taste better. There’s commentary aplenty, so much so that even CNN covered fridgescaping and called it “sharply divisive.” While much of the naysaying calls the practice “ridiculous” (with eye roll emojis), even a forced grab for social media engagement, some are more poignantly focusing on class critique: Is the high cost of groceries forcing us to fill our fridges with other objects? In his (very funny) “I’m Rich, You’re Poor” videos, influencer Shabaz Ali (@shabazsays) skewered the practice, noting that perhaps this is something for wealthy people who “have the time” to decant their milks.

Still, I wanted to try fridgescaping in my own life. It’s a crutch that I’ve been rationing the spice mixes my mother mailed me in 2017 and savoring a jar of anchovies I bought in Montreal last year. Could beautifying my fridge make life easier and also provide something therapeutic—an act of letting go?

Lynzi Judish, @lynziliving on TikTok, is a creator with nearly 22,000 followers who is “romanticizing” her home. Her first fridgescaping video posted in May, which now has more than 50,000 likes and 957,000 views, shows a time-lapsed deep cleaning, followed by the placing of various fruits and vegetables into wicker baskets and ceramic vessels; eggs go from a carton to an egg dish. Seems doable, not necessarily radical. Scrolling further, she begins developing “restocking” themes—a Bridgerton-themed interior that looks like a fridge for Marie Antoinette (16,000 views), or a Beetlejuice fridge with lots of black-and-white vertical stripes, backlit by LED candles (nearly 3,000 views). Many of the top commenters are thrilled with her creations. But she’s more earnest than most: she shows her drawers with cheese and meat in their original packaging, some bottled goods, and helps folks test antique vessels for lead. Elsewhere, others present decanted nut milks (dyed pink) in artful glassware placed next to tiny framed photos of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring or small terrariums with maybe-real moss. The fridgescapes are more flowers than feast, nearly devoid of actual food, and I begin to understand the revulsion.

Some users claim that fridgescaping encourages people to eat healthier. One creator, @BoredMoms (who states she is a dietician), blogged about her fridgescaping experience, saying, “Foodscaping can encourage people to choose healthier, more sustainable options, ultimately reducing food waste.” I imagine that’s because an antique crystal bowl of grapes is perhaps more appealing and hunger-inducing than, say, artfully arranged, uncooked hot dogs. Having your groceries organized in a literal twee display probably means you’re less likely to forget the carrots rotting in the drawer.

At its core, fridgescaping replicates the usual home organization tropes: pull everything that has been previously hidden out of its storage space, perform a thorough sorting and discarding, and design a system where every item has its place in view. There’s elements of Knolling in there—your most useful “tools” are on display in a manner pleasing to the eye—with some Konmari-like containers purchased for their specific storage qualities (sans holding onto the ketchup to see if it sparks joy). But that’s precisely where fridgescaping’s limitations lie: the act, while rich in textures, colors, and aesthetic emphasis, still seems to lack feelings around food and feeding people. Stylized design begins to stand in for the tender, yet often messy nature of getting dinner on the table.

Turning back to my own fridge, I gave up almost as quickly as I began. We had only recently bought our fridge—it’s smaller than most on the market at 22 inches deep and six feet tall (the delivery man reminded us, “they do make larger fridges, ya know”)—and spent a good few days sorting through its contents. Not wanting to buy new things for a fridgescape, I hunted around for decorative objects with little luck; those on display in my house already have their place on a shelf.

When thinking about what to do with our enormous variety of sauces, homemade dressings, and spice mixes—items that comprise more than half the fridge’s main shelving—I remembered that in many of the TikTok tutorials I rarely saw a jar of mayo or oyster sauce. @Lynziliving seems to keep her sauces in the fridge door; others avoid showing door shelves directly on camera. When I fill the door shelves, it only amounts to about a quarter of the jars. If I followed suit to decant everything into smaller (and fancier) vessels, they would, eventually, return to their dulled, messy appearance over the course of their long lifespan. Beyond the recent advisory from the U.K.’s Food Standards Agency about the risk of foodborne illnesses when storing food in unsanitized containers, the act of decanting everything—vegetables, liquids, whatever—feels like a hollow gesture when it comes to the mundane magic of food itself.

It’s what writer and researcher Kelly Pendergrast calls “aesthetic decanting” in her essay, “Merchandizing the Void,” which explores the austere pantry organizing of Khloe Kardashian’s kitchen. “Aesthetic decanting and TikTok restocking [is] a piece of theater that allows consumer goods to regain the appeal and shiny product-ness that wore off them in transit.... Without the supermarket to enable the child’s formative encounter with the object of desire (the cereal aisle, where Captain Crunch and Count Chocula call out like sirens from child-height shelves), it’s up to mom to reanimate the dead bulk Froot Loops by decanting and displaying them and bringing some spectacle back.”

Perhaps this is where the fridgescaping naysayers, happily lol-ing at gussied, luxurious fridge interiors, find their critique. Food, unlike other clutter, is already romantic because of its inherent use in literally keeping us alive; food is a spectacle, but preparing and serving it is the luxury.

I gently washed and wiped the jars, amended a few ingredients that required more careful storage (curry leaves will go dry; best to keep them in glass). When asking my partner if I should throw out his kumquat solids, he responded with, “they’re not hurting anyone in there,” and I suspect that throwing them away would erase a joyful part of his youth. We’re keeping them, and everything else, for now. The rest will come in time, as pulling ingredients out gave me new ideas for what to cook. Therein is the true perk of fridgescaping: at least in its formative steps, the practice can be about taking stock of what we have—no string lights, trinkets, or votives needed. I’ll keep my carrots, wrapped in their ugly plastic bag, in the crisper, and my grief can stay in the freezer.

Illustration by Kaitlin Brito

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