{"id":63074,"date":"2014-07-07T09:00:41","date_gmt":"2014-07-07T14:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=63074"},"modified":"2017-09-17T16:56:38","modified_gmt":"2017-09-17T21:56:38","slug":"one-hundred-years-of-the-fridge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2014\/07\/07\/one-hundred-years-of-the-fridge\/","title":{"rendered":"One Hundred Years of the Fridge"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"1<\/a><\/p>\n

Since their invention in 1913, and since this Kelvinator ad<\/a> first ran in 1955, refrigerators became bigger, better, and went from a luxury to a necessity. It\u2019s nearly impossible to imagine life today without having somewhere to store your vegetables and a place to keep your leftovers: in the one hundred years it\u2019s been around,\u00a0the fridge altered our grocery shopping habits and our attitudes towards food.<\/p>\n

Appliance companies and advertisers worked hard to transform refrigerators from \u201ca brand new concept in luxurious living\u201d to an everyday household object. They succeeded in the 1960s, after years of fine-tuning its features to appeal to the middle-class housewife, writes<\/a> historian Shelley Nickles.<\/em>\u00a0Besides ensuring the fridges were spacious, easy to clean, and had adjustable shelving, designers even took care of minutiae such as including warmer compartments \u2013 so that the butter kept in them would be easier to spread. Having attracted the housewives\u2019 attention and become affordable with ideas such as government-sponsored fridges floating around, the appliances made their way into middle-class homes.<\/p>\n

Buying too many\u00a0perishable items\u00a0suddenly became a minor concern. Buy one, get one free! Get more value for your money \u2013 purchase a bigger container! As the number of fridge compartments increased, so did the number of refrigeration-dependent foods and \u201csupersize\u201d deals offered in stores (or the other way around). Ultimately, grocery shoppers \u2013\u00a0mainly women<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 returned home with more food than they otherwise would have. Fridges enabled families to stock up, and the major weekend grocery haul was born. Now we have this<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But while having a fridge to store all the groceries made it possible to save more on \u201cdeals\u201d at the supermarket, it also enabled us to waste more later on. That is because the fridge operates much like a\u00a0time machine, but not without its limits. Sociologists Elizabeth Shove and Dale Southerton\u00a0describe<\/a>\u00a0freezers\u00a0as appliances that allow us to manage time: in addition to no longer having to shop multiple times per week, we can now prepare our meals in advance. The same holds for refrigerators.<\/p>\n

Food has its own rhythm, however, and a fridge can only delay the inevitable for so long. Leftovers simultaneously get pushed down in the hierarchy of what we\u2019d like to eat, and pushed back on refrigerator shelf, only to be forgotten and perhaps rediscovered when it\u2019s already too late. An exotic fruit rots in the produce compartment after its exciting novelty wore off, and we were no longer sure what to do with it. And so they all end up in the trash. Domestic food waste only represents part of all the\u00a0food thrown away in the U.S. today<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 about a third of all that is produced \u2013 but the way fridges altered out food purchasing and consumption habits is partly to blame.<\/p>\n

Not all is bad, however. Fridges not only allow us to eat a greater variety of foods and be more efficient in our everyday lives, we use them as\u00a0centers of communication and managing household life<\/a>. And as they become smarter, more energy-efficient, and with\u00a0some individuals refusing to use them altogether<\/a>, these cultural objects will doubtless have more stories to tell in the next hundred years.<\/p>\n

Teja Pristavec is a graduate student in the sociology department, and an\u00a0IHHCPAR Excellence Fellow,\u00a0 at Rutgers University. She blogs at\u00a0A Serving of Sociology<\/a>, where this post\u00a0originally appeared<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since their invention in 1913, and since this Kelvinator ad first ran in 1955, refrigerators became bigger, better, and went from a luxury to a necessity. It\u2019s nearly impossible to imagine life today without having somewhere to store your vegetables and a place to keep your leftovers: in the one hundred years it\u2019s been around,\u00a0the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":63077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[229,2124,2102,2088,253,272,290],"class_list":["post-63074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-consumption","tag-foodagriculture","tag-gender-history","tag-gender-marriagefamily","tag-history","tag-marriagefamily","tag-sciencetechnology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/06\/1-23.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63074"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63074\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71670,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63074\/revisions\/71670"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}