And you look.
What?
Nobody knows.
A tomato. A jar of mustard. Three yoghurts. A piece of Comté cheese wrapped in paper that’s gone translucent. A bottle of water. The exact same things that were there twenty minutes ago.
You gaze at it all for a few seconds, as if some major revelation might spring from the vegetable drawer.
Then you close the door.
Mission accomplished.
It’s probably one of the strangest behaviours of modern human beings.
## The fridge is no longer just a household appliance
Officially, a fridge is used to store food.
That’s not true.
Well, at least it’s become far too limited.
The modern fridge is also a place for meditation, a refuge, an antidote to boredom, a decompression chamber, and sometimes even a small, white-lit private nightclub.
We don’t always open it to eat.
We open it to see if anything has happened.
Which is obviously absurd since, barring some extremely worrying event, the contents of a fridge do not replenish themselves spontaneously.
And yet we check.
Again.
## Perhaps a tiramisu has appeared
Deep down, we harbour a little irrational belief.
Perhaps since our last visit, something marvellous has happened.
A chocolate éclair.
A forgotten slice of pizza.
Some smoked salmon.
A chocolate mousse whose existence we’d mysteriously forgotten.
Our brain knows the truth all too well.
We know that nobody has sneaked into the flat to secretly stow a strawberry cake between the butter and the gherkins.
But we look anyway.
You never know.
Perhaps that, after all, is what optimism is.
## The fridge as the answer to all questions
Stuck on a project?
Fridge.
Can’t decide what to watch on Netflix?
The fridge.
Have you just received a strange message?
The fridge.
Do you need to make an important decision about your career?
Why not start by checking the yoghurts?
The fridge is a brilliant distraction.
When faced with a complex question, it immediately offers something much simpler:
‘Might I fancy a bit of cheese?’
For a few seconds, the world becomes understandable again.
## There’s also the second part
This is perhaps the best one.
You open the fridge.
Nothing.
You close it again.
Then, ten minutes later, you come back.
It’s exactly the same fridge.
With exactly the same food.
Yet you inspect the inside again very carefully.
Like a detective returning to a crime scene.
Sometimes you move a jar slightly.
You look behind a bottle.
You might eventually spot a jar of fruit compote.
You think for a moment.
Then you close the door.
You’ll probably need a third inspection.
## Household objects have a psychological life
We have much stranger relationships with our objects than we care to admit.
We talk to our computer when it crashes.
‘What on earth are you doing?’
We swear at the printer.
We sometimes beg a coffee machine.
We praise a car that starts after several attempts.
We press the lift button four times as if our insistence might persuade it to arrive more quickly.
And we open the fridge with the silent hope that it might have something to offer us.
We live surrounded by machines to which we secretly attribute intentions.
The fridge is simply the one with which we have the most intimate relationship.
## The philosophical moment
Above all, there is that extraordinary moment when we stand motionless in front of the open door.
The light illuminates our face.
We stand completely still.
We look at a packet of ham without really seeing it.
And for five or ten seconds, absolutely nothing happens.
In a world where our phone constantly demands our attention, where notifications arrive every three minutes and where everyone seems to have to produce, comment, reply or react, the fridge perhaps offers us something extremely rare:
a moment of absolute emptiness.
We’re not really thinking anymore.
We’re not eating yet.
We’re simply there.
Facing the butter.
## And then comes the decision
Sometimes we leave empty-handed.
Sometimes we take something.
Not necessarily because we were hungry.
Simply because, after standing in front of an open fridge for twenty seconds, leaving without taking anything would feel like a failure.
So we grab a piece of cheese.
An olive.
A spoonful of something.
Anything that, in hindsight, gives a reason for our trip.
‘That’s why I came.’
A lie.
We had absolutely no idea why we’d come.
## Perhaps the whole of humanity fits in there
Man walked on the Moon.
He built cathedrals.
He invented the internet, the vaccine, the cinema, GPS and non-slip socks.
But he still gets up at midnight to open a fridge containing four yoghurts and half a lemon.
And in a way, that’s reassuring.
Behind our technology, our ambitions, our grand theories and our so-called rationality, we remain slightly bewildered creatures who regularly go to check whether something tasty has appeared in a cold box.
And the most marvellous thing is that tonight, once again, we’ll do it all over again.
We’ll open the fridge.
We’ll have a look.
We won’t find anything.
We’ll close it again.
And ten minutes later, seized by an inexplicable doubt, we’ll go back.
