One of the most cursed places in the world is a shared kitchen or lunch-room. I’ve clocked my share of frankly heinous things that simply cannot be unseen, and holy hell sometimes I don’t quite understand how things can get that bad – especially food. I spent the last while asking people what they’ve found growing in various shared fridges, cupboards, lockers, and unfortunate places, and boy did they ever deliver.
[jwplayer EozzJfLp]
Nothing is as traumatising as cleaning out a sharehouse fridge and finding food that doesn’t even resemble anything edible. A memory that has seared itself into my brain was the time I was sorting through a vegetable crisper and picked up a rancid cucumber. It had the shape and colour of a telegraph cucumber in its original plastic casing but was entirely goo.
Talking about this on Twitter brought up some frankly horrifying stories of shared fridges that included bowls of blood, a pair of brook meatballs in a ziplock bag, a literal human shit, and something so utterly putrid that a sign was simply stuck to the fridge that said: “don’t open”.
I used to work with a dude who would eat tuna for lunch every day/ as a snack. He would leave the bowl “soaking” with tuna and water and while it wasn’t in the rankest thing.
— ???? karen karenson ???? (@__rochellemarie) July 5, 2018
A whole, raw mackerel. The person who ate it just microwaved it for 2 minutes
— Jordan (@JordanZac) July 5, 2018
I didn’t even get to see what was inside it. It had a sign that said not to open it and we were asked to throw it out. As we started lifting it onto a trolley, the door slightly unsealed and the most foul smell spread across the room
— feed me bass drops (@emaciated) July 5, 2018
A blood “sample” in a bowl with glad wrap on it.
— Christian McCrea (@christianmccrea) September 30, 2019
these meatballs were pretty high on the list pic.twitter.com/0ddf8dhtuZ
— REEBOK PUMP (@SecretCommando) July 5, 2018
The wider Pedestrian offices have also had their fair share of kitchen horror stories including the one time we cleared out the pantry to move offices last year and found a container of brown rice with an expiry date of 2008. TEN. YEAR. OLD. RICE.
Another unnamed co-worker once chomped down on a piece of cold pizza from one of these shared fridges, wondered why it was a bit chewy, and realised they’d just bitten into an old band-aid. That raises a lot of questions for me, firstly why don’t you look at your food before you eat it and secondly, where was there a band-aid there?
One workmate by the name of [REDACTED] took a plate of leftovers out of their fridge, wondered why there was pesto on everything, and then realised that a bag of salad mix on the shelf above had liquified and drizzled down onto their food. Sounds delish, and a rare classic moment in the history of shared fridges.
I fondly remember a time of battling pantry moths in a sharehouse kitchen and in the quest to find what the fuck they’d gotten into, came across a glass jar that was once filled with some kind of food but had clearly turned into Pantry Moth HQ and was filled with weird moth web (silk?) and larvae. We just threw the whole thing out.
Finally, in what’s possibly the most terrifying and visceral mental image to date, a workmate of mine found a tub of hummus at the back of one of these known cursed shared fridges one time, and when the house opened the 1kg tub the contents inside “resembled a blue Furby.” Now I firmly believe that’s where all Furbies come from, and I will not be believing otherwise.
If there’s one thing we can learn from this, please please clean out your shared fridges on the reg. Which reminds me, I need to do that this week. Wish me luck.
