What's in your fridge?

What does your fridge say about you?
By STEPHANIE CONDRON, Daily Mail

To some, it is a food shrine, packed with nutritional and tasty goodies.

To others, however, the fridge is to be opened only as a last resort if no takeaway shop or restaurant is within reach.

Our choice of contents says a lot about our personalities, according to researchers, and can even give clues to what jobs we do.

They pinpointed five main groups of users based on what was chilling on the shelves.

Nutrition nerds

At one extreme is the nutrition nerd while at the other is the fast-food fanatic.

In between, there are the food faddy, martyr mum and restaurant regular.

Nutrition nerds care passionately about what they eat and tend to buy organic food.

Prominent in their chillers are bio-yoghurt, free range eggs, mangetout, aubergines and bottled water.

These fridge users are highly organized and tend to be in accountancy or law. They are also mostly single.

'If they coupled up, it would be with someone equally nutritionally nerd-like,' said businessman Reuben Isbitsky, who commissioned the study as a marketing exercise.

Fast-food fanatics

Fast-food fanatics, however, shun their fridges except as a place to keep left-over takeaways, particularly pizza, with perhaps some bottles of alcopop or white wine.

They may also store mayonnaise, tomato sauce and cans of fizzy drink, but just to complement takeaways.

Not surprisingly, this group is dominated by the young, with many being university students.

Food faddies tend to work in the media or the fashion world.

They know all the latest trends and keep plenty of vitamin-enriched juices and diet supplements handy in their fridges.

Other goodies inside could include soy milk, goats' cheese, vegetarian sausages and organic chocolate.

Martyr mums

Martyr mums, meanwhile, want to please everyone by buying the best brands for their families. 'They have everything in their fridge,' said Mr Isbitsky. 'They are just trying to keep everyone happy.'

The typical contents of a martyr mum's fridge include fish fingers, rump steaks and veggie burgers.

Cans of cola and packs of processed cheese could also be squeezed in.

The martyr mother could also keep cans of beer and lots of leftovers from meals such as chicken tikka masala and sweet and sour chicken in case anyone fancied a snack.

Restaurant regulars

Those defined as restaurant regulars tend to be older professionals or celebrities.

Aside from the contents of their fridges - bottled water and ready-made salads for evenings in - the thing they share is being successful. Some 400 people were surveyed for the study this month for marketing firm Timestrip.

The company carried out a similar survey in the U.S. but found that Americans were less easy to categorize than Britons.

Researchers did, however, find one defining feature of fridges across the Atlantic: they are mostly very big.

Sun 03/29/09 04:03 PM