Communal fridges are broken. Here's the fix.
TLDR: Label your stuff and eat what you can
Introduction
A large number of people living and/or working together need to eat. This is true of corporate offices, coworking spaces, group houses, and other arrangements where many people spend many hours together on a regular basis.
This is a particularly salient concern when there exists stratification among the people living and working together. In a mixed group of people who order delivery, bring food from home, and/or cook in the office, there will inevitably be an ongoing tide of leftovers and uneaten food that needs to be stored for future consumption, either by the food’s provider or by others in the organisation.
Numerous competing interests need to be served:
Protecting food belonging to individuals
Putting excess food up for grabs
Minimising theft
Minimising food waste
Maximising fridge space available to the community
Having spent a month living and working in such an environment1, I identified a serious gap in the design of systems to facilitate food storage in a communal kitchen environment. The lack of clear system, save for a few vague and unenforced paradigms, creates friction and tension unbecoming of a productive cohort of colleagues.
The current design does little to serve any of the above listed interests. Food to be protected is not protected. Excess food is not signalled as being up for grabs. Theft is ubiquitous, precisely because it’s never clear what is theft and what is altruistic scavenging.
Based on the advice and input of Gwern Branwen, I propose a new system that serves all interests simultaneously.
The Current System
I live and work in a campus with two communal kitchens and three communal fridges. They are:
Fridge A, which is fully communal. In addition to being stocked with butter, dairy, condiments, and fruit for all, Fridge A is also the “up for grabs” fridge. Sticky notes leave dire warnings: DO NOT KEEP PERSONAL ITEMS IN FRIDGE A. The unspoken rule is that any leftover food left in Fridge A is up for grabs, no matter how recently it was placed there.
Fridge B, which is nominally for private use. The guiding philosophy of Fridge B is “put your leftover food here,” but in practice much of the food in Fridge B is unlabelled, and even the labelled food is prone to theft. This is an interesting contrast to the third fridge.
Laundry Room Fridge which is also for private use but, inexplicably, seems more respected than Fridge B. Something culturally— perhaps its distance from the shared kitchens— seems to deter theft from the Laundry Room Fridge in a way that Fridge B does not.
This system is terrible. It’s especially terrible when considering Forkable, the office’s catering service.
Forkable delivers low-cost lunches to everyone working on the campus, but it is opt-in. One must order 24 hours in advance if they want to receive a Forkable order that day. Each day around noon, dozens of orders are delivered at once to a communal shelf, where recipients can collect their food at their leisure.
This design creates innumerable problems, including but not limited to:
What happens to unclaimed food? All orders are labelled, but no one is going to track down every individual and tell them to collect their order. The food must be moved to Fridge A, Fridge B, or the garbage, none of which are optimal.
What happens to excess? Often a Forkable comes and the recipient is unavailable to take it. Additionally, sometimes unwanted leftovers are theoretically claimable by others (such as pizza), but broadcasting this information (”hey, my pizza is up for grabs”) doesn’t scale well.
What happens to excess over time? Sometimes uneaten food is forgotten (particularly by those who order Forkable every day— the portion sizes in the US are very large). It is very painful to watch a perfectly good meal spoil in the fridge because the owner has forgotten about it, but it’s awkward to ask someone “hey, can I have your falafel bowl from Monday?”
Ultimately this is an issue of altruism as much as it is an issue of design. The economic status of a person who has $10-15 USD to spend on a Forkable lunch 5 days a week is very different from that of a person who gets most of his meals scrounging complementary bagels and avocados from the communal kitchen. On some level it is not just good design, but indeed morally correct to design a system that facilitates the transfer of forgotten food from the well-to-do into the hands of the have-nots.
What follows is my best attempt at such a system.
A New System
My workplace has at least one thing right: three is the optimal number of fridges to support such an ecosystem of lunches. Very little has to change. My system demands only two things: once-daily intervention by administrative staff and a change in mindset on the part of fridge users.
For the sake of mindset-shifting, I have changed the naming scheme of the fridges.
Fridge 1
This fridge is totally communal. Complementary oat milk and blueberries will be stocked here, and there will be ample space for individual contributions. Anyone who buys a giant bag or garlic or a big hunk of Argentine “parmesan” or an unwanted Forkable is free to put it here.
Anything in Fridge 1 is up for grabs, from strawberries to entire meals. Users must internalise this: they must feel no guilt in eating a hearty burrito bowl from Fridge A, and they must feel no grief at losing their burrito bowl because they put it in the wrong fridge.
Fridge 2
This fridge is the Forkable fridge. It exists exclusively for unclaimed/unwanted Forkables. Any unlabelled food in Fridge 2 ought to be treated as communal and eaten out of spite.
At 2:00 PM (late enough to accommodate slowpokes, but not too long so as to endanger food safety), all unclaimed Forkable orders are transferred from the delivery rack to the top shelf of Fridge 2. At the same time, all items in Fridge 2 at 2:00 are shifted down one shelf. As illustrated in Figure 1, food moves down daily. After 3 days unclaimed (probably the optimal time to account for fast-spoiling foods such as chicken and avocado), the food reaches the bottom shelf where it is up for grabs, open season.
As long as everyone understands the system, unclaimed food can be seized with no ill will. If someone wants to save their leftovers, they can do so easily! They can either move it up the shelf to prolong its lifetime (effectively winding back the clock by 1-2 days at a time) or by transferring it to Fridge 3.
Fridge 3
The golden rule of Fridge 3 is that everything must be labelled. Any unlabelled food in Fridge 3 ought to be treated as communal and eaten out of spite.
Fridge 3 exists for long-term storage of things like pistachio milk or stuffed olives or giant blocks of cheese: foods that will be slowly picked away at over a long period of time. Users may put whatever they want in Fridge 3, so long as they are labelled with a name and a date.
Once a food item is labelled, it is the user’s responsibility and they may revel in their food item for 14 days. Once that deadline passes, the food item is disposed of by staff. At any time the owner of a food item is free to update the label, but the 14 day deadline is a hard deadline.
Why This System is Better
The current system treats the fridges as shared spaces for keeping food at a safe temperature, which is too essentialist. It fails to consider the social nuances of a 50-100 person ecosystem of workers, cohabitants, and eaters who fall into a variety of different categories.
The most obvious benefit is to the scavengers. These people do not order Forkable regularly out of austerity or low appetite. When they are hungry, they have an (immoral) incentive to steal lunches. This system redirects that energy towards scavenging out of Fridge 1 and the bottom shelf of Fridge 2.
This system is slightly detrimental to the whales to the extent that it eventually deprives them of their food. But a frictionless shared fridge where anyone can store their belongings indefinitely is antisocial design. It is inconsiderate of the realities of communal spaces. Creating just a tiny amount of friction, i.e. “you must label your food and intervene if you don’t want your food thrown out”, selects the people who care about their leftovers vs. the people who order too much and don’t intend on finishing everything.
Of course, this system still has problems. Labour is a big one: someone needs to intervene in Fridges 2 and 3 to shuffle/discard items. It also assumes that items in the communal spaces of Fridges 1 and 2 will be eaten and don’t need any timelines for discarding. The Fridge 2 timeline in particular is problematic: a salmon poke bowl is probably no good after 3 days, but a lentil rice bowl is probably edible for much longer than 3 days.
But in a large coworking space that already offers complimentary food (and therefore employs staff to restock/maintain the kitchen), it’s not unreasonable to assume that manpower exists to implement this design and that voracious scavengers exist to polish off over 90% of food that reaches the bottom shelf of Fridge B.
If the alternative is hunger, food waste, and lunch theft rage, this system is clearly superior.
I’m a Resident at Inkhaven 2 in Berkeley, CA. I am writing 30 posts in 30 days for the month of April. See my progress here!
I’d like to briefly address the Inkslop allegations. This post does not constitute Inkslop by the Stanleyan definition. This is not a metapost. This is an exercise in systems design proposed by Gwern Branwen, refined and published by Philip Harker, applicable to any coworking or cohabitation space the world over. Lighthaven is simply a useful reference point for this design document.
Appreciating "the Stanleyan definition", going to have to steal that