What is National Clean Out Your Fridge Day?
Excuse the pun, but the timing has never been riper to celebrate National Clean Out Your Fridge Day on November 15! This is the perfect opportunity to tackle that science experiment that’s been growing way in the back, there. Of course, ideally, we’d all clean out our fridges far more often than once a year, but let’s be real: Making it an annual occasion provides everyone with the reassurance that at least the horrendous situation with your roommate’s long-forgotten “homemade kombucha” will be rectified eventually, and marking it as a day on the national calendar gives you plenty of scope for getting passive aggressive in the preceding weeks.
History of National Clean Out Your Fridge Day
New technology means new problems. Ever since the first household refrigerator hit the market, consumers then became burdened with a new thing to deal with – cleaning it.
From 1911 to 1922, the technological advances of home refrigerators and refrigeration technologies increased at the rate of speed rivaled only by smartphones. It wasn’t until 1927 when GE produced the “Monitor Top,” a reference to the ironclad Civil War-era ship, the USS Monitor. This model alone sold over one million units.
It wasn’t until post-war America that separate freeze box units were created and used in addition to the typical refrigerator. And then, in the 1970s and 80s, further developments helped created a the combo model we usually see today.
Regardless of what kind of refrigerator they had over the years, everyone had the task of needing to clean it out. Whether its the moldy oranges, the brown bananas, or that milk you forgot about, cleaning a refrigerator is something that American’s over the past century can relate to.
