COLUMN: The cold facts about men, women and refrigerators
When a man and a woman live in the same space, there are a few areas in which there must be some understanding in order for peace and harmony to exist. The refrigerator, although not typically considered high on the list, is actually one of the most volatile areas of gender-cohabitation.
There are many reasons for the separation of the sexes on the subject of the icebox, but if observed, the following list of rules will help any couple out there whose relationship might be in cold storage because of the refrigerator.
Rule One: Women, unless it is for two items or less, never send your guy out grocery shopping for you. Somewhere around age 13, males forget the four food groups they were taught in first grade and create their own. They are: 1) Meat that’s cooked on a grill. 2) Meat that’s not cooked on a grill. 3) Fast food defined as burgers, fries, burritos, and pretty much anything else that you can buy at a basketball game. 4) The stuff the wife keeps in the two, bottom fridge drawers.
Rule Two: All men should purchase an extra freezer. If there is one truly universal law I have found in this life, it is that the average woman purchases at least twice the amount of freezer food one could ever hope to cram into that little space, whose real purpose is to make the ice and to get the soda colder as fast as possible.
Somewhere along the way, someone figured out the obsession between women and frozen food and created the Schawn’s Guy. This is a man who drives around an armored-plated truck and sells women industrial-size bags of broccoli, chicken breasts and desserts, that there is no earthly hope of fitting in an average refrigerator’s freezer.
Rule Three: Women, never have a man put groceries away in the fridge. A man does not know what a “crisper” is, nor does he realize that certain foods go in certain places in the fridge. Why do you think we spend so much time standing in front of it with the door open? When a man puts groceries away, he doesn’t rotate oldest food to the top or front and he does not know that there is a place for cheese and a place for condiments.
Putting food away in the fridge for a man is like playing a game of “Perfection” where he puts the food in as quickly as he can wherever it fits, size-wise, that is.
Rule Four: Simply deal with that fact that men and women view food expiration differently. Men and women usually agree on food expiration when it comes to things like milk, eggs and yogurt that come with a date printed on them. It is things like leftovers, takeout and pizza that define the battle lines of expiration.
Women have a complex set of rules for these foods that have been handed down from generation to generation that takes in general humidity, multiplied by the barometric pressure, divided by the number of minutes since it was placed in the fridge, and finally subtracted by the square root of the thickness of the plastic wrap the food was placed in.
Men have one rule, if it doesn’t have mold on it, it is OK.
So when the refrigerator’s chilling effect has you and your sweetheart’s love on ice, just remember it’s only food and that everyone has a room for a little understanding and forgiveness.
Bryce Casselman’s column appears every other Monday in The Statesman. Comments can be sent to him at yanobi@hotmail.com.