Fridge sociology: Your icebox can reveal if you think like a rich person (and even, if you’re on your way to becoming one)

“I am fridge-obsessed. We know that as people get richer, their diets change. I realized that the answer is the fridge! The fridge could tell me how people would behave once they had some extra money,” Tassos Stasopoulous, founder and managing partner of the London-based investment firm Trineta, told Wired. He came to this conclusion while assembling a report on what people would be in the future. Instead of relying on data analysis and predictions, he decided to travel to India, his birth country, to ask people directly, and wound up repeating the experiment around the world.

“I was asking people, ‘OK, assume you get a salary increase. How will your diet change?’ They’d all say, ‘I wouldn’t change anything,’” he recalled. “But we know that as people get richer, their diets change.” One day, he met a woman from a humble family, and asked if he could go food shopping with her. He gave her money for her purchases, and the woman wound up selecting Coca Cola, Cadbury chocolate bars and other kinds of snacks that were far removed from what she normally bought for her household. Stassopoulos had already examined her refrigerator, which led him to the realization that people’s fridges could give him clues as to how they’d spend their money if they had more of it.

From that point on, he began to collect fridge photos, organizing them by the economic situation of their owners. He found that people with fewer resources used their refrigerators as storage for basic ingredients for making traditional dishes, or for saving leftovers from such meals. The middle class stocked products made by international brands, like ice cream, soft drinks, and beer. According to Stassopoulos, when a family member begins to make money, they want to give their kin the things that they were previously unable to buy. The fridge, in some ways, becomes their domestic point of pride. Not to mention, proof of individualism. Where a middle-class household had luxury items like a tub of ice cream, a rich one had several, every family member’s favorite flavor. Together, but separate.

Beyond different flavors of a single product, moneyed fridges also contain ingredients from different cultures and healthy foods like low-fat options and those containing probiotics. At the top of the income ladder are coolers full of organic, fair trade and cruelty free products that come in reusable packaging and are usually much more expensive than average fare. “Refrigerators are more than just a place to store perishables. Their contents speak volumes about their owners, and their proliferation signals a country’s economic progression. Fridges and their contents, therefore, can serve as a guide for investors seeking to understand the spending habits of emerging-markets consumers — a group that is projected to increase spending eightfold,” says Institutional Investor. “A person with items including a laptop computer, television, cell phone and sound system could be classified as rich. Yet in our field research, we’ve met people in countries like Ghana whose ramshackle homes are full of electronic devices, yet by other measures would be considered poor. Kitchens offer a more honest reflection. Behind the fridge door lies an abundance of information that can help us understand who emerging consumers are, and how they’re likely to spend money.”

Tell me what you chill and I’ll tell you…

Stassopoulos says that in working-class homes, refrigerators are primarily used to preserve basic products like eggs, fruits, vegetables and a few pre-cooked items. Middle-class fridges tend to have more luxury items, from alcoholic beverages to ice cream and cheese. Wealthy homes have fridges in which health emerges as a top priority, and that typically store low-fat and organic products. A clear sign of wealth is healthier food in the fridge, something that may seem like a given but really shouldn’t be, Anna Taylor, executive director of the Food Foundation, told The Telegraph.

Oxfam Intermón, a Spanish NGO that forms part of Oxfam International, says that if every person living on the planet sat down to eat together, their plates would form a living image of a diverse world. “The problem is not that what’s on their plates vary, but that it is very unequal,” said Taylor. “In his 2006 book Hungry Planet, [photojournalist Peter] Menzel shows that while a German family spends around $500 a week on food, one in Chad has to feed itself with a little over $1.50. Also, the Western diet uses many more resources: land, water, and atmospheric emissions, whose costs are not reflected by their price tag.”

The fridge as closet

Reality TV shows and social media have allowed the world to peek inside the refrigerators of celebrities. Some, like former model Yolanda Hadid, who is the mother of cover girls Bella and Gigi Hadid, take so much pride in the content of their fridges they’ve dedicated online bandwidth to documenting it. Such is the interest in these famous fridges that in some cases, they’ve even replaced the primacy of the clothing, giving rise to the so-called practice of “fridgescaping,” which consists of carefully arranging one’s refrigerated wares.

The term was first used in 2011 by a retired interior designer named Kathy Perdue. “My post shows how I made the inside of my fridge a little prettier by using vintage bowls for fruit and organizing it in an attractive but still practical and functional way. I thought to myself of how many times a day the Fridge is opened and why shouldn’t it be pretty inside,” she explained on social media.

“They say you can learn a lot about a person by looking inside their fridge, but what used to be a simple observation about lifestyle choices has evolved into something much more elaborate. At its core, fridgescaping involves transforming the refrigerator from a traditionally practical storage space into a visual display. No longer content with simply organizing food, enthusiasts are introducing flowers in glass vases, ornate containers, and even framed family photos to their cold shelves,” writes journalist Kieron Marchese in Architectural Digest.

María Arranz, food journalist and author of the Spanish-language feminism and gastronomy book El delantal y la maza (The apron and the mace, 2024), told EL PAÍS that, “after the era of obsessively organizing one’s fridge, which had a very aesthetic goal, came the baroque era, which left behind the slight practicality of organizing every single product in your refrigerator, flinging itself into pure aesthetic delirium. And just like ‘fridge restock’ videos, the refrigerators I see in fridgescaping videos tell me a couple of things: that you have a big enough refrigerator to put in all of those unnecessary objects, and that you have enough time to do so. Which is to say, it’s a status symbol,” she said.

It’s not just the interior of refrigerators that serve as an indicator of their owners’ wealth, but also the fridge itself. From immense walk-ins like Kim Kardashian’s to models that are designed to blend in with their surroundings, rendering them invisible at first glance, rich people’s refrigerators aren’t just filled with food worth a fortune — the appliance itself cost a bundle. “Au courant refrigerators resemble the imaginary dragons of childhood fantasy in that they are both invisible and enormous,” wrote Caity Weaver in a New York Times article on the “status fridge” phenomenon.

Nicola Twilly, author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves (2024), wrote in Wired that, “But for all refrigeration’s advantages — the efficiencies, the ability to save leftovers and prevent waste, the seasonless abundance — it also locks its users into a system that has enormous, if routinely overlooked, harms. Most urgently, and most ironically, the more we cool our food, the more we warm our atmosphere. As the developing world undergoes the transformation that the United States experienced during the 20th century, we are long overdue a full accounting of the cold chain’s costs, as well as its benefits. After all, while ice cream definitely needs to be kept cold, there’s no reason that chicken, yogurt, and strawberries do; they just need to be preserved. The fridge of 10 years’ time might not be a fridge at all.” In the future, our continued purchasing of new refrigerators may not only be seen as a status symbol, but also as a window onto the 21st-century soul.

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