This year, my garden failed—in part because of late planting, since we had just moved in to the place; in part because of the heat and drought this summer in Colorado and the wildfires that ripped through the landscape; and in part, because I was so tired, a weariness that left me TV-watching and bingeing drive-thru food to try to cure it. I felt sick of cooking, sick of staying home, sick.
One day, in June, when my squash plants were barely seedlings, I walked two blocks with my children to a playground, and on the way home, we passed a neighbor’s house. The neighbors had planted beds of vining squash that ballooned across the front yard, the large happy leaves waving at us. The owner sat on her driveway, a crew of small children dancing around her. She called us over. She walked over to her plants, bent toward the stems, and cut fruit for us. She sent us off with something green in our hands.
She was not a native English speaker, but she made her intention known. “Anytime you pass,” she said, and she waved at the vines. What’s mine is yours. Take and eat. When I arrived home, I placed the bright green squashes in the fridge, already planning our next meal.
This is not the way Americans usually eat. Our ancestors foraged, while we lumber through the aisles of the grocery store, all the out-of-season greens and reds available whenever we want them.
More miraculous is the act of being able to pull open refrigerator doors just steps from the spot where we sleep. The way the chill settles around us, the way we lean into the light of food there for the taking, far beyond anything our ancestors could have dreamed. Though more readily available than at any time in history, what we eat remains personal.
Would you let a photographer stand in the same glow, doors flung aside, to stare into the depths of your fridge?
Sharing is exposure. We all have secrets at the back of the fridge, refuse at the bottom of the freezer. (What does it say about you if you don’t have secrets at the back of the fridge?)
In mine, if you leaned in close, you would see chicken bones frozen together in a plastic baggie. A film of milk or a ring of barbecue sauce dried on a shelf. You’d find my experiments—the beets harvested from the front yard we could not eat, preserved in sweet vinegar, a mason jar filled to the brim. You might see a seven-year-old’s leftovers: the last of a drippy popsicle, one bite of taco, a half-finished yogurt.
Mark Menjivar has beheld remains such as these. He has stood before the doors of a wide-open fridge and snapped a photo. In fact, he has preserved the moment in the life of 80 households’ refrigerators and, in some cases, has returned to document the same refrigerators years later. His photographs are intimate, unposed, raw.
A carpenter’s freezer contains the meat of a 12-point Buck, recently shot and butchered on his Texas ranch, along with a half-drunk bottle of tequila. A midwife and middle-school science teacher’s fridge holds the contents of a CSA haul, all technicolor vegetables. A bartender’s fridge is full up with Styrofoam take-out boxes and condiment bottles. One fridge belongs to a person living on $432 per week, while another is owned by a woman recently ejected from her family due to her mixed-race marriage.
To stare into a refrigerator reveals identity in ways we do not expect. There is the question of values: do you eat what you say you do? There is the question of food security: do you have what you need? There is the question of time: do you have the capacity to worry about such questions?
Menjivar, in his revealing photographs, grasps a fundamental human truth: humans change. Or at least our eating habits do. In a time of polarity, I need that to be true more than ever. I can swap take-out boxes for greens, tequila for milk. You and I are not what we eat; we are much more than that.
I am not a small woman. Often my kids have called me “fat,” not out of mean-spiritedness, but as the first descriptor that came to mind. They are not wrong. I also believed that my mother had been fat, though I understood the word as taboo.
I am thirty-three and understand that my mother and I once shared a body, and now no longer do. It has been a long time since I exited and separated from her. So why do I still think of her, the way she baked chicken breasts and steamed broccoli and piled white rice onto our plates?
My fridge is always packed and I am always cooking. My two children eat ravenously, several snacks daily, plus the family meals with my husband and me. (They tell me they are training to be American Ninja Warriors and so they really, truly need all those calories, especially the ice cream.)
When I fill a cart at the grocery store and the clerk comments, Wow, that’s a lot of food. I answer, My kids are hungry. But this is not entirely true; I am hungry, too.
My mother dieted, but I never do, or almost never. I indulge. I buy the almond croissant at the coffee shop, I return to the pantry after dinner, searching, and I habitually eat one more bite than feels good. I also grow my own zucchini, herbs, and tomatoes in the backyard, in rows behind the soccer balls flung across the yard and the tree swing. I buy flats of peaches from the market, cultivated by farmers, to can in sugar and citric acid, whole vanilla beans floating amongst the curved orange bodies. I order microgreens, delivered to my doorstep by a neighbor who waters the sprouts and cuts them from the bed and settles them into a plastic container, all with his own hands, so I can in turn layer them onto our sandwiches.
I wonder why I think of my mother and her body so often, of her “relationship” to food, the way we describe addiction. I now have my own means of eating and my own tastes and others who ask for my recipes, ones she never made. But still, her body remains my starting point, and my fridge remains my confessional.
Which makes me think I’ve gotten the idea of food all wrong. Food is not meant to be hidden or hoarded or measured, but shared. Christ has been called the “host of heaven,” his very flesh offered to fill whoever is hungry. In that case, my task remains simple: open wide the refrigerator doors, and feast.
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[All photos shared with the artist’s permission.]
