Week 9: Hoarding and doomsday psychology: the stuffed fridge as emotional solace

Module 3 — The tyranny of time.

A full fridge is a comfortable thing to look at, and this is worth pausing on, because it is not a rational response to your provisioning situation. You cannot eat a full fridge before a substantial part of it turns, and at some level you know that. The fullness is doing something other than feeding you.

This week takes seriously the possibility that the refrigerator’s real product is reassurance, and that reassurance is precisely why the waste of week 8 is tolerated. An empty fridge produces a response out of all proportion to the actual risk — a low-level existential unease, in households ten minutes from a supermarket and in no danger of hunger. That reaction is learned, and the appliance taught it: bulk storage becomes possible, then normal, then the baseline of what “enough food in the house” feels like. Falling below the baseline registers as threat rather than as an ordinary Tuesday.

Prepper psychology and pandemic panic buying are the same behaviour with the volume turned up, which is why they are so instructive. The empty shelves of early 2020 were less a failure of supply than a demonstration of what a great many households believe a fridge and a freezer are for. Not nutrition. Control — over an unpredictable future, purchased in advance and stored where it can be seen.

From here the course’s economic claim becomes psychological: much consumer behaviour is the purchase of emotional value rather than use value, and the fridge is among the most efficient emotional-value delivery devices ever installed in a home.

Inherits from week 8: the waste is structural and measurable. This week asks why it is comfortable.

Outline#

• fullness as affect rather than provisioning
• the empty fridge as an existential rather than a nutritional problem
• prepper psychology, and the freezer as an object with a theory of the future
• panic buying as ordinary stockpiling under stress
• emotional value versus use value in consumption

Reading#

• David Evans, Food Waste: Home Consumption, Material Culture and Everyday Life (2014) — the chapters on anxiety and provisioning
• Selected interdisciplinary papers on hoarding psychology and emotional geography, distributed in class

Tutorial preparation#

The tutorial is psychological mapping — you will draw your ideal fridge and your anxious fridge. Nothing to prepare, but come willing to be honest. The Critical Essay is due this Friday, at the end of this week.