Growing up in boarding school, I used to look forward to holidays. The one thing that I think, that fueled my longing for home [apart from missing my parents] had to be the pending meat ‘chow down' - the whole sheep that my father would buy to celebrate my return. Now there is one thing that used to amuse the hell out of me, and that is how my mother used to store a whole sheep for months on end. What boggled my mind was the fact that even when we'd get a weekend off from school; I'd still come home to that sheep and it tasted as good as it did when my dad first bought it.

No, my mother doesn't have some long kept family secret on meat storage - she has a simple fridge. And as most households have a fridge, most people might find it stupid to have even been awed by common knowledge such as cold storage. Well I don't find it stupid at all; in fact, it still amazes me that that same fridge is still my mother's answer to cold storage. Why can't all forms of storage be that effective? Just imagine; in its fourteen years of existence, that fridge has been neighbor to about fourteen different fruit and vegetable racks (or whatever they call that plastic stand you keep your veggies in).

The way I see things, the general consensus is that fridges are for refrigeration rather than storage (and maybe that's true) but wouldn't it be lovely if you could store everything in a fridge? Before you say that's the silliest thing you've ever heard, consider this; how many storage solutions are as effective as the refrigerator? And of those (if any), how many will, after fourteen years, still serve you better than Friday served Robinson Crusoe did every day of his (spared) life? And that's not half of it; what about the fact that as much as it might be the biggest electrical appliance in your kitchen - it uses less electricity than your new dishwasher yet you only use that once a week (at the most) In the meantime, your fridge is never turned off. But should there be a power cut or something of the sort, most fridges will hold out for, at least, two days or so. Last but not least, fridges are not just some invention which keeps our food, drinks and (at times) medical supplies refrigerated; they're more than a mere electrical appliance - think of the photos, the random messages we leave on them for our loved ones (with those magnetic letters) - they're part of the family!

I've heard of plastic bags that keep your food fresher for longer...but they too are useless without the mighty refrigerator. A fridge in my opinion is like an experiment gone wrong - I reckon it was meant to chill your milk for a few days or so; and maybe for cold water...but keeping meat in eating condition for six months or longer? That raises a question in my opinion. It is though, not the only thing it has raised - it has raised the bar in storage solutions; these plastic and metal container solutions companies had better start thinking of ways to improve storage to within half of what fridges do. Maybe a container whereby you can store a simple pair of jeans for ten years, yet still fit in them two babies and seventy pounds later. Until then the fridge is the mother of all storage.