“Marie Kondo your fridge” the headline urged.*
As you probably know, Marie Kondo is the tidiness and decluttering queen. Who doesn’t like her concept of “tidying up in a way that will spark joy in your life and change it forever”.** In pursuit of those sparks, Marie K advises us to roll up our underwear, socks, overcoats etc and stick them in neat vertical multicolored rows in our bedroom drawers. I must admit, it does save some space, and helps me to decide whether one piece of clothing is actually a pair of long white socks or a dead seagull that has chosen to fly in and die in my top drawer. Also, the vertical tubular arrangement of my garments is a bit artistic like the hairy legs of a men’s synchronized swimming team sticking up vertically out of the water.
I have actually experimented with letting Marie K loose in the refrigerator. Taking on her persona, I opened the vegetable drawers which contained slightly elderly veggies including some needing a mould shave. I tried to stack them vertically in interesting color combinations to spark joy and change my life forever. However, I found that wilted celery, even when cut to size, still drooped like an uncooked sausage in the sun. The green beans grew dizzy from standing up all day and fell over randomly, the enthusiasm of the asparagus spears was blunted when required to stand on their heads and the sweet corn became bitter about the whole process. As for the aforementioned sausages, they simply refused to cooperate and slumped over into the zucchinis for moral and physical support, a habit that did not improve the flavour of either. There was also a problem with the fish fillets, which, because they are spineless and boneless, slithered into the bilge of the fridge.
Another suggestion in the article about how to Marie Kondo your fridge was to put all the ingredients for each meal into its own colourful container. I did try this once. I bought some pleasing pastel plastic containers but found that the minced meat for the hamburger patties oozed into the hamburger buns and the lettuce had to be showered and patted dry before it considered itself fully prepared to participate in the meal. I’m not sure of the logic of the “all ingredients in one neat container” plan. It seems to me it just adds extra steps of filling the container, labeling it and eventually washing it. I do concede that the multicolored plastic containers look more joyful than the usual random arrangement of food. However my normal haphazard setup has one big advantage: the placement of the food suggests unique flavour combinations waiting to be discovered, due to simple proximity. How else would I have discovered the joy of sauerkraut and baked beans on toast or the flavour spark of cauliflower, peanut butter and yoghurt as a side salad?
Another MK inspired suggestion in the article was to put the fresh and healthy snacks at eye level, to encourage ease of access to good-for-you food, while hiding the chocolate in the frozen peas to keep temptation out of sight. In practice, I found that I ignored the cherry tomatoes and celery sticks, no matter how handy they were, and developed frostbite from regular hand searching of the aforementioned frozen legume packet.
I must admit that the Marie Kondo method did manage to spark joy in me, as she hopes for all her followers. As I held and communed with the chocolate, painfully extracted from the bag of frozen peas, I did feel a little thrill “as if all the cells in your body are slowly rising”. ** This cell uprising increased in magnitude when I actually ate it. On the other hand, according to MK, “when you hold something that doesn’t bring you joy you will notice that your whole body feels heavier”. It is true that I certainly felt heavier when holding the 2kg bag of frozen peas. Should I therefore, as MK recommends, thank the peas and then respectfully chuck them out ? It would be such a waste of food, as well as a lost opportunity to develop some fascinating new food combinations such as frozen peas and frozen blueberries with frozen breadcrumbs.
On further reflection, I realized that the Marie Kondo article is actually groundbreaking in a completely unexpected way. It pioneers a new form of English sentence construction and grammar. How? By using a person’s name as a verb. I have briefly done some research on this, for an upcoming scholarly journal article, and will probably include the following examples as well as “Marie Kondo your fridge”:
“Steve Irwin your swimming pool” by adding baby crocodiles;
“Leonardo da Vinci your ceiling” with hand sprayed murals created by your local graffiti artists;
“Dame Nellie Melba your workplace” by retiring from work and then reappearing at the office again and again without an invitation
and “Ned Kelly your wardrobe” by occasionally wearing a suit of bulletproof armour when you are feeling vulnerable.
© Geoff Milton 2021
* The Age, Melbourne, April 1, 2021. I am still undecided as to whether this whole thing is a joke to fool April fools like me.
** Penguin.co.uk “Marie Kondo’s six basic rules of tidying”
