freezerburn

freezers, over-consumption core, and millennial hankerings

Two years ago, I tagged along with an excited friend who was in search of a rare find: the Stella McCartney vegan country pie. Like a meat pie, but with rehydrated soya protein, and doused in onion gravy. We visited a witchy-themed vegan grocer out of town, who’s small shelves stored the most fascinating and illusive imports. Centre stage were the freezers of imported vegan foods, like lasagnas, banana bread puddings, samosas, vegan seitan ribs, and Jamaican-style vegan patties. The holy grail was quickly procured, albeit with an expiration dating back two years prior.

Photo by Dev Benjamin on Unsplash

“It’s fine, because it’s been frozen this whole time,” the storekeeper said.

I instinctively winced. Here were these coveted vegan country pies, designed by name association, their value accumulating ice crystals as they sat in the icebox puzzle on a store floor. The excitement of customers entering was palpable, lapping around the freezers and clutching rare finds like Pokémon. I snagged some coconut bacon (for sandwiches) and my own pies, done in by my own curiosity.

The experience reflects how I position millennial understandings of food after COVID. Collectible, but better if frozen. In some ways, I wonder how much of our 2010s foodie legacy has evolved into a later iteration, one transfixed by deep-freeze possibilities, particularly so for those of us with children. With more cramped and ephemeral spaces, as well as shifts in grocery access (reduced trips during pandemics, heightened food costs, inflation), how do we manage our food storage, acquisition, and preservation? As our perhaps more optimistic decade of “foodie-isms” turned into hobbyist food activities, what draws us to the freezers? Are they really just a place of abundance and induced demand?

Of refrigeration, anthropologists see a toolbox. Something to be excavated, where the remains of material culture can provide insight into the mental and physical desires of a household.

That it gets archaeological treatment does not surprise me—I, too, understand the fridge to be a window into a person. It is one of few places in a Western, North American context where the behaviours and aspirations are funnelled into tangible objects, things to consume. Where ideas for meals, and the experiences that are written into them, begin to come to fruition (or alternatively, grow mould). An expansive site where a researcher doesn’t have to rely solely on self-reporting to uncover the story of self or family.

But a freezer is a place of even more borrowed time than a fridge. A place for forgotten promises to go without rot. A place for quick visits, banana graveyards, and freezer burn accumulation. In reading Nicola Twilley’s Frostbite, I was stuck on the limitations of freezer use depicted in it. Descriptions of the studies from the early millennium of families and how they used them pointed to what I know to be all-American: going big and going home to store it (somehow). Twilley writes on the patterns of over-consumption that emerge with North American fridges:

“Abundance, as manifest in refrigerators and homes, is both comforting and stifling: the thirty-families stockpiled food so as not to worry about running out but then got frustrated when they couldn’t find anything in their overstuffed appliances.”

The families in reference were from Los Angeles, studied between 2001 to 2005 by anthropologists. This was done at the height of the modern archaeology-through-garbology craze ushered in by professional garbologist, William Rathje.

While overconsumption and overstocking undoubtedly remain incentivized tasks at the grocery store, how does this extend to the state of our freezers? Millennials are saddled with the challenges of future provisioning with precarious housing. And during the pandemic, frozen food purchases increased heavily for Canadian millennial and Gen Z shoppers (33%, compared to 26% of the general population). Some of the surveyed reasons for this relate primarily to convenience, not wanting to cook (general malaise of lockdowns), and family-caring (kids and aging grandparents) for millennials.

What’s different from the frozen ghosts of Hungry Man and Lean Cuisines past are two intertwined features that feel distinctly millennial-coded. While there’s an emphasis in media trend coverage of frozen food around the idea of Gen Z and Millennials “entering the family formation years” (ick wording), there is also more rotting produce in grocery stores, more need (and perhaps, hopefully) more interest in pushing against season-less availability of fruits and vegetables.

The same Caddle survey identified that when it comes to important traits of frozen meals, taste and flavour were paramount, followed by “price (25%), health (10%), ingredients (9%), and brand.” Yet Canadians were also looking to buying frozen packages of fruits and vegetables. I, too, have shifted considerate focus into buying frozen produce where I can. This isn’t just because of affordability, but because so much was sitting and rotting on shelves throughout the last four years.

As Christopher Lombardo wrote in 2021, “Since the onset of [Canadian] lockdowns, frozen food sales have been exploding, with particularly big gains in frozen vegetables (up 129% from March 2019), frozen fruit (up 117%) and potato products, like fries (up 60%).” Why buy a plastic box of wilted spinach for $7.99 (CAD) when I can buy frozen spinach in bulk for $4.99? I don’t think family-leanings are solely at play here. I’m not always convinced that the generational motivations around choosing frozen food are strictly an act of convenience, so much as a broader current of concerns around costs, politics, and that recession the banks keep skirting.

But then, the next question: where to put it all?

In a 2022 study of the fridge as a place of material culture, Bird and Jensen look at how fridges can be used to understand health practices. Of this, I am skeptical. Nutritional studies relying on interviews and self-reported dietary intakes have long been a limitation, as well as the undercurrent of the cultural values and anxieties that shape an understanding of “healthy” eating and what that entails. We lie, or we try to focus on the good, and perhaps worry about what it means if we have a few chocolate bars kicking around in our cupboards.

To that end, there’s the aspiration that comes with the performance of shopping, too, and what ends up in the fridge. The promises of a planned or spontaneous meal idea that come along with the grocery list infiltrate how food is stored, and what ends up in the vegetable hospice at the back of the fridge.

At its more extreme, there are the aesthetics of fridges and notions of class and gendered constructs about what it means to look into a fridge. Like many, I’ve long held that the idea of minimalism is for the wealthy, who can afford to strip down the basics without sacrificing something that might come in handy one day. I panic watching the fridge restocking videos on TikTok, where orange juice is poured from an “ugly” branded carton into an “elegant” glass container. Container to container, dust to dust.

Freezers, though, provide a different window. Long term planning, bulk purchases meant to last, convenience foods for quick and easy meals. Baked goods or doughs left for a rainy day. Breastmilk, dog bones, Kawartha Dairy Muskoka Mocha. All those lasagnas you meant to eat and didn’t. Maybe a bottle of white wine that was left too long and forgotten. The hopeful Costco trips where too many boxes of bulgogi were acquired.

Considering overstocks is overwhelming, regardless of fridge or freezer. There are so many points between leaving the house and returning with packages where consumption is demanded, loudly and with neon signage of deals or exclusive offers or a new you through food. My frustrations align in some ways with what Twilley writes of, in that fridges centralized household food storage systems. With this technological shift, the need to expand the storage came with the ability to buy more food and keep it from wasting. As Twilley noted: “Close to half of the families surveyed kept a second refrigerator in the garage; nationally, one in four households has two or more fridges.”

In my home, we have three freezers. I know this screams middle class Westerner, and yet it felt at one point necessary (the small one in our kitchen for ice packs, breads and bagels, and ice cream; the downstairs medium freezer for our meats, soups, and convenience meals; the large garage one for my giant dog’s raw meat packs bought in bulk). The cost-effectiveness of being a Costco household, of storing and freezing meats, is something I understand as middle class concerns. It is a practice I’ve witnessed with my Depression-era grandparents, stockpiling for the time where food may not be so readily available. (My grandmother’s basement freezer was a cornucopia of dinner potentials, I had rarely witnessed her shops but knew there would be enough to feed me for months on end if needed).

To avoid the stuffed and abandoned route, my husband suggested we use the (many) reusable bags that are doled out in Canadian grocery stores now. A nation-wide plastic bag ban has had unanticipated issues with abundance of cheap, reusable bags. To put them to use has meant a portioning of meats: the chickens from the pork, the turkey ground from the sausage, the lasagnas and pizzas from the frozen bags of homemade soups). It has meant that it’s easier to grab and identify a need, to reduce the waste. We’ve taken great efforts to focus on meal planning in order to cut down the abandonment, and use our space, time, and money more wisely.

This is no small thing to me, as my family has grown, and each has a steady appetite unto their own. To make use of a freezer during a cost-of-living crisis has been essential for steadying our budgets and stretching our meals further. Is this a definitive trait of millennials, who have been noted for their increased frozen food purchases than those before them? How much of this is our innate spark of curiosity when it comes to food possibilities (fresh or frozen), and how much is just the evergreen need to stuff a freezer with discount foods for (real or supposed) times of scarcity?

I am perhaps too optimistic in my assessments of freezers and how people use them—particularly for families and the realities of what goes into them. I would like to think that the millennial foodie culture has been folded into the sourdoughs kneaded through COVID. That the DIY interest in canning, pickling, and preserving foods is equal measures re-leaning lost skills of early generations and trying to afford life in late-stage capitalism.

Is that lazy of me to think? I am curious, and want to know more, and hope we use them to sustain ourselves, our loves, our families, our friends.

Thank you for reading! AnthroDish Essays come out biweekly on Sunday mornings.

If you’d like to support my work, paid subscriptions are $30 USD per year (or $5 USD monthly). Paid subscribers receive two additional Sunday newsletters per month: an AnthroDish interview transcript and a round-up of recipes, books, and shows of the month. There also are some additional fun perks coming later this year!

You can find me on Instagram, Threads, and TikTok, but I can’t promise it’s anything except random thoughts on any of those platforms.