As I was vacuuming out the freezer the other day (a perfectly normal thing to do, by the way), it dawned on me that we have some strange items in our Maytag. A package labeled “neck bones” freaks me out every time I see it. I know the neckbones are from a cow and not anything more sinister, but I still get caught off guard. I have a tiny fear of a guest putting something in our freezer and catching a glimpse of that package and being a little disturbed.
I often wonder why people choose to freeze certain things. I recently talked to a woman whose sister stocks up on food and puts everything—and I do mean everything—in the freezer. Most items sounded perfectly normal until she said her sister buys potato chips on sale and stores them in—you guessed it—the freezer.
Where I come from (not here), potato chips are not considered a staple and since we don’t need them, we don’t feel it’s necessary to buy several bags in a buy-one-get-one-free deal, then upon arriving home, throw them in the freezer. I just can’t imagine that an 8-month-old bag of chips that has been yanked out of the freezer is going to be all that tasty at a picnic in July, but then again I’m too cowardly to try it.
I think back to when my husband and I were first married and we had so little money that the thought of wasting any morsel of food was unheard of. Freezing what we didn’t use was a savvy way to go about our food stewardship.
But some things simply will not freeze. Take, for example, the time we bought groceries and realized we had to go away before we’d have time to eat the salad. Naturally, being newly married and not knowing much about homemaking yet, we froze the salad.
Arriving home after our trip, we wondered why someone had broken into our apartment and left a bag of algae in the freezer. This is a mystery that still has gone unsolved.
As much as I scoff at people who freeze bizarre items, our household is a bit hypocritical on the matter. And I’m not talking about packages labeled “neck bones,” either. That’s normal compared to what I find in my freezer now that the children can reach the door handle and make their own contributions.
Remember the freak snow we got in October? My forward-thinking children made snowballs and put them in the freezer so they could have a snowball fight in July.
But the latest gasp-worthy moment was when I opened the freezer one day to find a pillow shoved inside. Upon questioning, one of the boys admitted that he liked the cool feeling of the pillow against his cheek as he drifted off to sleep. I had to admit that, although we’d be eating smushed hot dog buns at some point in the future, he had quite an ingenious plan.
Maybe I could save a bundle on necessities like potato chips if the freezer wasn’t full of normal things like snowballs and pillows.
Freelance writer and homeschooling mom Dawn Mast lives in Broadway with her family, a freezer she is sometimes afraid to open, and a large dog.
