Decorating the inside of your fridge with picture frames and flowers? That’s ‘fridgescaping’

(CNN) — Lynzi Judish had decorated nearly every corner of her New York home, from the ceiling of her dining room to the tiny crow’s nest on her top floor.

All that was left to spruce up was the inside of her refrigerator.

So Judish started “fridgescaping,” or decorating the inside of a fridge like it’s any other room in a home. The trend has alternately delighted and enraged TikTok viewers, who either swoon over the romantic scenes at 35 degrees or fume at the apparent inanity of curating a space most people will never see.

Judish’s fridgescapes involve thoughtfully arranged produce, such as a bouquet of asparagus in a vase, and charming storage containers, like pink glass pitchers and antique ceramic butter dishes — “anything that will beautify your food,” she said.

Recently, she’s started theming her fridgescapes around properties like “Bridgerton” (or “Fridgerton,” as Judish calls it), swapping out condiments and unsightly cartons for fridge-safe decor like picture frames and figurines.

Judish admits that going to such lengths to decorate the inside of her fridge “maybe sounds excessive.” Some viewers don’t understand why she’d stick a porcelain bust, string lights or fresh flowers alongside a bowl of bell peppers or a carafe of orange juice.

“I feel like I made very unintentional rage bait,” Judish said.

Fridgescaping is sharply divisive

Fridgescaping wasn’t born on TikTok. Judish credits Kathy Perdue, a retired designer and former lifestyle blogger, with inventing the term in a 2011 blog post.

Perdue’s version of fridgescaping was much more subdued than TikTok’s interpretation. She merely cleaned out her fridge before a grocery trip and storing produce and eggs in fashionable vessels.

“Why not put your everyday food items in pretty containers and have something pretty to look at when you open the door?!” Perdue wrote.

The fridgescapes popular on TikTok today have more in common with an ornate Christmas window display than with Perdue’s take.

Fridge decor has become so heightened that Rebecca Bingham, who posts her thrift store finds on TikTok, wasn’t sure whether the videos she was seeing were “serious or not.” Inspired nonetheless, she created her own “over-the-top” fridgescape with candles, vases, a tiny mirror and embroidered artwork — the produce was nearly outnumbered by knickknacks.

Her fridgescape, though, was just for fun — she took everything out as soon as she shot the video, since most of it wasn’t food-safe. Then she realized that her video was an unintentional commentary on the rising cost of groceries — it might be easier to fill a fridge with ephemera than with food.

“(Fridgescaping) is easy to satirize because it takes something as basic and practical as food storage and turns it into a stylized, almost performative act,” Bingham said. “When you see fridges arranged like museum displays, filled with color-coordinated items or non-food objects, it highlights the absurdity of making something functional look perfect for social media.”

Critics of fridgescaping take issue with the inconvenience and seeming frivolity of extending interior decorating to one of the more intimate spaces in a kitchen. A chorus of critics recently found Judish’s videos after fridgescaping was featured in a popular Reddit forum where users share disagreements they’ve had and ask Redditors to weigh in. (In this incident, a user said they told their wife that her fridgescaping hobby was “stupid.” She removed all the decor from the fridge, the user said, but was acting emotionally distant.)

Judish said she knows that fridgescaping “would not work for most people.” It’s an involved process — her first fridgescape took hours just to deep-clean and prepare the produce, and she lead-tests all of her food storage before it goes in the fridge.

But it works for her. Judish said that storing her produce and keeping it out where she can see it motivates her to eat it before it goes bad.

“I’ve never felt healthier, which is a very unexpected side effect,” she said.

She curates her grocery list around her themes, which means she’s cooking something new every week. When her fridge became an enchanted forest, she filled it with edible flowers from her garden so she could “eat like a fairy.” And for a fridge inspired by the historical time-traveling series “Outlander,” she picked out produce that would have been available to American colonies pre-Revolutionary War.

And while it’s painstaking work, designing a new theme every two weeks, opening her fridge every day provides an instant dopamine rush, she said.

Bingham, who preaches “mindful consumption” on her account and encourages her viewers to only buy things that “have a place and purpose,” said that fridgescaping “can sometimes feel at odds with those principles.”

But ultimately, fridgescaping isn’t worth getting angry over. It’s best appreciated, Bingham said, as ”a playful trend.”

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