Winning the Good Fight Against the Refrigerator

Idris Hsi, June 16, 1998

Two of my friends went to help clean out the apartment refrigerator today. If you read the other story about how I ended up in this apartment you'll know that the following biological horrors were not my fault. Once we opened the thing and assessed the damage, we had to fall back on those 3 rules of refrigerator cleaning safety.

Don't do anything to endanger yourself. i.e. smell, don't taste the food, don't wave it about while showing it to your incredulous and very nauseated friends, and don't open the bulging containers.
Decontaminate every surface that you clear. It's like spraying garlic in front of a vampire - it keeps the mobile elements of the refrigerator from expanding.
Don't let the evolved food drag you in and shut the door. Call for backup first.

One of us loaded the flamethrower while the rest of us put on environmental suits. We ran a videocamera to document the experience, hooking it up to a remote computer. The computer was set to download the feed to a remote site in case something went wrong. This way, others would know what went wrong and could make better preparations to clean the fridge the next time around. Some disinfectant with a strong herbicide and fungicide mixture was loaded into the spray bottles. Lastly, we prepared some radioactive dye and radio collars to track the food once it left the apartment, in case it decided to return.

Some of the exciting items we found included:

Milk dated from March 19th. If anyone is curious, it actually separates into water and some white stuff. (For you science folks, this is called curdling (Meg Stanford has to be credited for reminding me of this fact. She's a biology professor and probably sees grosser things than the kind that I complain about. But I'm a wimp.))
Some living hot dogs. Our on-site analysis suggests that the microbial lifeforms had formed an exterior colony and were using the hot dog as a form of internal endoskeleton, much like a coral reef.
Some liquid things in bags that were motile. Fortunately, the bags were sealed tight, reducing their ability to reproduce and spread.
Something furry which darted into the air conditioning vents.
A slug growing on top of what might have been a potato that was feeding off of an open can of tomatoes that was clearly several months old.
Some other mystery vegetables.
Containers of "I can't believe it's butter" in various stages of spoilage, surprising all of us. (Cause, we all know that it isn't butter but rather vegetable oil and buttermilk stuffed with preservatives - what microbe would grow on it).
Smelly French cheese that might have improved with age. None of us were brave enough to find out and we were already pretty unnerved by what we had seen. (See Rule #1)
Meat that had thankfully frozen solid in the freezer over the last year. Who knows what it would have done if it had thawed.
Lastly, some grayish cream cheese. I suppose that the roommate who owned those food items had intended to eat it with the green bread on top of the refrigerator.

We flamed all of the food that was starting to evolve as a service to humanity (we don't need the extra competition). Some of the more harmless items were humanely stored in a nearby trash receptacle and released into the dumpsters. (Doh! - those are the dumpsters under my window. So much for sleeping tonight.) We fitted that trash bag itself with a radio collar and let it scamper off into the wilds of Atlanta. Someday, scientists will be able to use the information gathered by the collar to create work for gullible graduate students.

For now, I have enough clean refrigerator space to begin staging my takeover of the rest of the apartment. I figure it gives me the moral high ground. "What do you mean this is your space? I think my friends and I saved your lives by cleaning out your food..." ;-)