2025

A love letter to Roland Barthes in three parts.

1/ On /r/fridgedetectives

Speaking of algorithms that are very good at their jobs: Reddit has recently started suggesting me posts from /r/fridgedetective. It’s a sub where people post pictures of the insides of their refrigerators or freezers, and commenters make guesses about their age, location, lifestyles, personality traits. It’s mostly roasts, pun intended. 

Unlike /r/bookshelfdetective - in which analyses seem to walk the same line between precision and ambiguity as AI-generated astrology apps - commenters on /r/fridgedetective are reduced to making meaning out of even greater symbolic abstractions. Books have titles, they contain texts, they have shared cultural meetings. 

While food products and fast-moving consumer goods are texts for social meaning, their ephemerality and indeed relative subjectivity (food is, fundamentally, a matter of taste) obfuscates their legibility. 

There’s an obvious sociological read to all of this - who’s eating fresh produce, organic food; the paradoxical significations of a fridge filled with nothing but expensive, probiotic sodas - but this kind of interpretation is obscured by two key realities. 

The first is that very few people fit neatly enough into any consumer category for the untrained eye to get an accurate read on even basic socio-demographic stats. Every refrigerator contains the metaphorical can of Four Loko next to the sourdough starter, as it were, and you can’t play in the domain of the psychological if you’re stumped on the biographical. 

The people who seem to perform best at the intended “game” behind /r/fridgedetectives don’t play like psychologists or sociologists, but actual detectives: “You’re based in Vermont and you’re 420-friendly. There’s a bottle of tinctures poking out behind the milk, and I googled the grower."

The second barrier to accuracy is far simpler: people’s eating habits are really weird. Weird in forms of excess (fridges filled with nothing but frozen meat, every existing flavor of Yoplait, and a quantity of pineapples typically seen only in elementary school math problems) and in forms of absence (two bottles of ketchup, a lone potato).

Thus the strangeness - the deviation from the pre-supposed norm - becomes the only available topic of discussion. In cases like these, the refrigerator becomes a site of judgement as the role of food as a cultural, or even moral, nexus for interpretation is thrown into light by this deviation. Not only should you not eat that much fruit, you cannot - it’s bad for the planet, it’s packaged in plastic, it’s immoral. 

2/On fridge-scaping

This brings me to my favorite population on /r/fridgedetectives, those who I call the Curators.
Allegedly inspired by the “iconic” refrigerator of none other than Kris Jenner herself, “fridge-scaping” then became the cause-célèbre of a whole community on TikTok. 

Pre-packaged food is spooned from original containers into carefully-labeled glass jars, organized in neat rows; apples are polished and stacked in pyramids. Non-edible flowers are placed into small vases dotting the edges of shelves organized with the careful, unobstructive visual merchandising of a luxury boutique.  

Food itself - goods which once acquired meaning by being taken out of the refrigerator, placed into use - now carries symbolic value even as it remains static. This could only be a product of the digital age: food, photographed or filmed, overcomes the inherent temporal limits of its materiality. Digitally material food does not spoil, it lasts forever as an enduring brick in an ongoing project of self-construction. 

Thus the lowly refrigerator, once a private, enclosed space, is opened to the world as a site of self-expression and consumer identity. If the fridge itself was once the commodity that heralded the arrival of an atomized age of consumption, so too does the interior now enter the post-structuralist domain of cultural abstraction. Like other symbolic goods, it becomes a site of categorization, then optimization, and finally aestheticization. 

What feels particularly notable about fridge-scaping - actually, I’d go so far as to say uncanny - is exactly that underlying sentiment of anxiety, a yearn towards perfection and optimization. In a world when all consumer choice is open to judgement, the scaped-refrigerator is exempted from judgement and beyond reproach. It reflects a systemization and reflected thinking that suggests the owner’s mastery of consumption itself.

We now operate in a constant state of anguish faced with the impossibility of making a consumer choice that feels moral. There are fewer and fewer social and cultural norms around food, only conflicting interests and needs. Protein is good but meat is bad; pre-packaged foods will save you from cutting up fruit for a screaming toddler but will poison his brain with microplastics; if you don’t eat organic you’re killing the planet, but you also can’t afford it.

Add to this an endless barrage of newness, product innovation for the sake of it in the American food sector, an endless onslaught of branded cacophony intended to distract and entertain the consumer brain, and satisfy our unnamed need for something else.

If only this cognitive dissonance could be overcome by choosing to simply rise above it, to make what feels like a moral choice to prioritize beauty, efficiency, and cleanliness. To stop consuming and - haven’t we been told this is the way forward for years? - to curate instead.

In five years, they’ll be selling little aquarium castles you can put in your toilet bowl. 

 3/The extension and retraction of the political self

First, a quick personal note. I’m not sure why, but over the past two years or so, I’ve become incredibly neat, clean and organized. This is very new for me. If you were to go through my closet, you’d find neat rows of Kondo-folded t-shirts; my bookshelves are arranged in order of theme, size, and visual harmony. If all that seems unsurprising to you, know that I got detention at least once every single year from 5th grade to graduation for keeping rotting lunches and half my wardrobe in my locker. 

And so we come to something very ironic. As I was looking for some old photos a few weeks ago, I realized that I had, in the process of a recent meticulous reorganization of the shelves under my desk, accidentally thrown out my entire PhD. 

Two years worth of notebooks, articles, and work on consumer self-hood - including very highlighted, dog-eared, and well-loved copies of Belk’s Self-Extension (1988) and Self-Extension in a Digital World (2013) - were lost to the ether. 

It was in the process of mourning that loss, and downloading fresh prints of those articles, that I realized I’d actually been reading a key element of self-extension backwards this entire time. Those papers, that work, did not define me - they were merely materializations of things I knew already, an experience that contributed to my sense of self. 

Belk’s theory of self-extension argues that “nouns” - the people, places, and things that surround us - are part of how we understand ourselves. They’re atoms that orbit a nucleic core - the self. They allow the self to extend, they are tools that afford us agentic expression in social life. Self-extension is a theory of understanding. It is not a theory of practice.

Indeed, the growing visibility of these atomic goods - facilitated by digital platforms that afford their use as tools of self-expression, and exemplified by phenomena like fridgescaping - has transformed how we understand them in relation to ourselves. Objects of consumption are no longer tools for self-extension, but self-construction, even creation. Our things are not us, we are our things. Our souls are only as beautiful and as pure as our refrigerators.

Recently, much has been made in the Strategy business of a supposed forthcoming “dark vibe shift,” a seismic change in the cultural landscape marked by the rise to power of American fascism, shaped by nihilism as our only shared value.  

8ball founder Sean Monahan - you will recognize him as the father of the term normcore and the herald of the last vibe shift - predicts the rise of the ‘boom boom aesthetic’ characterized by a return to masculine codes, a certain fetisation of the past, and the expression of wealth and power as the key symbolic objective of consumption.

He cites Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book “Abundance” which argues that progressive politics of degrowth are fighting a losing battle because they propose less: “Less cars, less energy, less clothes, less meat. Austerity is the business of autocrats. No one votes for their life to get worse.” 

The political implications and the sociological implications are one and the same: degrowth posits a posture of loss and reduction antithetical to a concept of self-hood built on consumption. In a society without history, in which identity, expression, and sociality are reduced to one’s position in a consumer society, the supposed “taking away” of one’s agency and individuality are understood not as progress, but as violence. 

Indeed, in a landscape that offers the consumer psyche nothing but conflict, the rise of the ‘boom boom aesthetic’ - and new fascist aesthetics more broadly - proposes to resolve that cognitive dissonance by recentering the locus of morality in consumption itself, in the amassment of wealth. 

What’s in my refrigerator, and who am I? Asks the American consumer.
Steaks, chilled martini glasses, and protein drinks, answers the boom boom aesthetic.
Everything is organized, green, organic, beautiful, says the fridgescaper, and I am safe.

There’s an alternative, of course. Belk considers people, not just objects, to be tools of self-extension. If we can no longer muster a shared sense of self-hood - outside the ambient nihilism that now characterizes American culture - then let’s at least turn the focus of our sphere of influence to those around us. The way forward lies in co-construction and relational self-identification: what do the fridges in my community look like? 

And since you asked: tomato juice, Babybel, several bunches of green onions, a lone Siggi’s yogurt (plain), whole milk (for Frosted Flakes), glass water bottles, a bag of kale, a cup of duck fat that’s been there since my birthday, Reese’s, and a bunch of condiments.