Fridge Wars
America’s civil war starts at home.
In The Beginning, Man Ate Meat
In July 2019, I went to my parents’ house to recover from kidney issues and related surgeries. At that time, my father was a competitive cross-fitter and Olympic weightlifter, even though he was in his late sixties. It was his sole focus in life—the only thing he did in his retirement—besides watching TV (YouTube and Fox News, naturally).1
Thanks to YouTube nutritionists and bro culture, he adopted a carnivore diet. It’s more than just eating meat. He gets the best, fanciest, free-range, organic, hormone-free, grass-fed, ocean-caught, no-nitrates, butchered only by leprechauns, and blessed by priests ordained in Antarctica (no tariffs), animal products available.2
He painstakingly weighs and counts his macros. Food takes up a lot of his planning and energy to acquire and prepare. He also really enjoys eating meat, so it’s a big part of his day’s happiness. He’s living his best life.
The fancy meat is his, and his alone. The rest of us don’t rate fancy meat. We get the regular hormone-injected stuff where the chickens are waterboarded and the beef might actually be horse. But whatever. We don’t cross-fit. If we did, he’d probably share.3
My parents have always had a strictly traditional marriage, and so my mom does the cooking. My father eats a lot, though, and she doesn’t want to cook all day—she’s tired and finds it irritating, especially because she has to weigh everything. To cope, she cooks huge batches of meat every few days. Several times per week, she’ll hard-boil two dozen eggs, grill a dozen bison burgers and top sirloin steaks, roast a couple of chickens, bake a low-carb meatloaf in a sheet cake dish (from meat she grinds herself), and make fresh yogurt from whole milk. Occasionally, she slips vegetables from her garden into bone broths she brews from scratch.4 She also cooks all the dog’s food from scratch.5
The Trad Refrigerator
This story takes place in my parents’ refrigerator. You see, my father is militant about earmarking his food. It’s probably a diagnosable neurosis. It’s his, and there will be hell to pay if anyone touches it. His dominion over his own rations also includes noisy opinions about what the rest of us put in the refrigerator, and hence into our bodies. The family is trained to avoid unpleasantness by sticking to their designated areas of the fridge, eating away from the house, and eating in secret.
Long ago, my mother developed a fridge organizational system. There are areas designated for my father’s food, the dog’s food, the community condiments, my father’s beverages, the community beverages, and garden produce (for my mother, who sneaks salads when he’s not looking).
Part of the fridge is cordoned off as inviolable for my father’s food. It’s his space. None shall trespass. We all silently understand, and no one speaks of it.
My mom doesn’t have her own space for food because she doesn’t eat, which is a habit she passed to me when I was a pre-teen.6 Occasionally, my younger brother brings my mother a milkshake, and she takes in calories. She doesn’t want my father to see, though, because he’ll try to get her to eat meat instead of milkshakes, and she’s sick of steak. She longs for lasagna.
My brother, as he lived there at the time, got assigned a produce drawer. It was his sole designated space for groceries. He filled the drawer with ranch dressing and ketchup packets from midnight fast food sojourns.
Vegetables Seek Asylum
The fridge arrangement was weird, but it worked—until my uncle moved in.7 You see, my uncle is a vegetarian. Can a vegetarian and a carnivore co-exist in a single household?
Not in Trump’s America.
It started innocently enough. My mother designated the second produce drawer to my uncle, so long as she got to partake in the salad occasionally. Within days, he expanded my mother’s garden, and they (my mother and uncle) dispensed with the lawn. Not to be outdone, my father took up the rest of the former lawn and made a giant weightlifting pad and bar structure.
At the time, I thought this was good. My mother had long lamented the garden’s neglect. My father hated maintaining the lawn because he had allergies. But soon all that homegrown produce wouldn’t fit into its single designated drawer.
On the days my mother didn’t have a meat processing line going in the kitchen, my uncle pre-cooked batches of rice dishes, oatmeal, vegetables, breads, beans, etc. Being my father’s brother, he has a similar penchant for—we’ll call it—detailedness. All of his food was carefully selected, weighed, and measured. His curated ingredients and pre-made dishes went into their own little glass jars with lids. Nothing went to waste. A slice of tomato left over? Glass jar.
Like my father with his artisanal meat, my uncle buys artisanal vegetarian food from Sprouts and Trader Joe’s. “I only eat the best,” he said. The fridge acquired a duplicate set of condiments, with the new bottles boasting of their delicate processing, rarer ingredients, and organic/non-GMO plant-based pedigrees. His tortilla chips must be blue. His beer, imported.
My uncle’s food is beautiful.
A Cold War
Soon, my uncle’s glass dishes and produce multiplied and expanded onto the refrigerator shelves like neatly stacked, very polite gremlins. And then he did the unthinkable: He reorganized the fridge while my mother was visiting my sister for a week.8 His dishes of vegetables encroached upon the meat, and possibly gave it cooties.
Not one to take such an aggression lightly, my father pushed back. He built meat forts. Butcher paper-wrapped protein was stacked like stones from shelf to shelf, stable only in their sheer density. And he didn’t just reclaim space. No! My father expanded to parts of the fridge previously held by other household members. His meat had a manifest destiny. He seized one of the produce drawers like it was the Crimea.
The next day, two bowls of plums from the backyard tree appeared on the shelf, taunting the wall of steak. As did a large bowl of garden tomatoes and several jars of my uncle’s homemade simple syrup.
When I returned after my surgery, there was no space for me to put a single lemon or a bottle of water. I was told by my father that lemons now go in the basket on the table. Water can be cooled with ice. My brother sweetly said I could keep stuff in his drawer. But there was only enough room for one item. I decided on pickles.
Since I was unable to drive, I worried about subsisting on pickles. My uncle invited me to nosh on his food at will. He opined that I should be plant-based for health reasons.9
My father adamantly disagreed. He argued my diabetes required me to eat carnivore. But even as he insisted I not eat carbs, he didn’t offer any meat. Nonetheless, his opinion and lifelong training made me hesitant to eat anything, so I stuck to pickles and fasting.10
As the week wore on, my father ran low on pre-cooked meat. He looked wild-eyed and resorted to protein shakes with raw eggs as his primary sustenance. So while the vegetarian arms race had constant reinforcements from the garden, the carnivore arms race suffered from shortages.
My father arranged the eggs where the meat used to be, like they were in bread lines. When the eggs dwindled, my father built a wall of sugar-free coffee syrups around the top shelf. The bottles were heretofore in the pantry because they don’t actually need to be refrigerated.
And this is where things stood when my mother returned home. She opened the fridge and gasped. “Why are all the syrups in here?” she asked.
“I needed to protect my space,” my father explained proudly, before exiting the kitchen in a cloud of self-satisfaction.
My mother looked at me with a silent question in her eyes.
“He’s manspreading,” I answered.
She didn’t know what that meant, but she nodded sagely.
The next day, my mother rearranged the fridge and restocked it with meat and eggs. She put a fresh batch of homemade dog food into two containers and placed them between the meat and vegetables. Dog food became the fridge’s demilitarized zone.11
An uneasy peace returned.
Peaceful Vegetables Get Expelled
Several months later, I visited for Thanksgiving. My uncle wasn’t there—something my parents neglected to tell me in advance. He had voted for Biden, which my parents found intolerable, and he had to move out.
Astonished, I sat in the living room listening to their justifications. It was their home, and they didn’t have to brook someone who would vote for the literal devil, Joe Biden.
I made noises of disapproval, too stunned to be articulate.
“Who’d you vote for?” my father asked—a challenge since my disapproval of Trump was known.
“Joe,” I responded, with a hint of defiance.
The single syllable hung in the air.
My mother gasped.
My father blinked and then grinned. “Oh, you mean Jo. The Libertarian.”
From 2012, beginning with the first Libertarian run of Gov. Gary Johnson, I had been active with the Libertarian Party at a high level.12 So they assumed “Joe” meant “Jo Jorgensen,” the 2020 Libertarian presidential candidate. It was a reasonable assumption, but I hadn’t meant to mislead them.
Clocking their reactions, I shrugged and left their assumption uncorrected.
My Evolving View of Trumpism
Let’s flashback to my personal journey with Trumpism. In 2012, Roger Stone—one of Trump’s closest political advisors—worked with the Gary Johnson campaign—and me, since I was General Counsel. I had occasional contact with Roger over the years, including in 2015 when Trump first announced a run. But I declined any involvement with Trump’s fledgling campaign, due to my sense that Trump was likely sexist and that it would make me uncomfortable.
Later, in December 2015, I told my friends that I didn’t think Trump would win the nomination—too unserious. I was wrong. Then, at the Libertarian National Convention in 2016, I told the delegation from the stage that we needed to run our dual-governor ticket because Trump was already making fun of us.13
I stuck with the Libertarians in 2016, and believed Clinton would win the presidency. Early in the Election Day returns, however, I saw the trends and knew Trump would win almost immediately. I told my staff my prediction. Admittedly, I thought it was a little funny. Trump’s election was, in my words at the time, “The most Amurrikah thing to ever Amurrikah.”
During his first term, I had mixed feelings about Trump and what he could do to our Republic. Perhaps I suffered from normalcy bias and a conservative upbringing. I even worked on some defensive legal matters before the grand jury in the Mueller investigation. But with exposure and time, my opposition to him grew.
As a person with life-threatening blood clotting and autoimmune issues, the pandemic was incredibly frightening. In a steadily growing chorus, people said to me that the pandemic would cull the weak, disabled, drags on society, like me. This was natural, and good, they said, openly wishing for my death as preferable to wearing masks.
Trump went from a response I respected (let’s get a vaccine developed and out as quickly as possible) to harnessing hatefulness and fear for political opportunism. He permanently lost my “political independent” tolerance. And I voted for a Democratic candidate for the first time in my life.
A Microcosm of MAGA
My family’s Fridge Wars revealed something about the worldview of those attracted to MAGA. Whether shelf space should be made for vegetables in a YouTube-carnivore-Jordan Peterson world was also about whether my uncle—and people like him (and me)—deserved space in America at all. And this dynamic is played out in family homes and text chains all over the country.14
MAGA didn’t create my family’s dysfunction. The fear, anxiety, and insecurity that engender intolerant and selfish behavior came from generations of poverty and abuse. But MAGA gave that dysfunction the veneer of legitimacy. MAGA says building walls isn’t selfish and uncharitable; it’s sensible and patriotic.
My parents have significantly more money than my uncle. Their attitude about their wealth gap is boringly predictable. They judge him: “We earned our money, and since you weren’t equally successful, we’re better than you. We made better choices. We deserve more. You deserve less.” Never mind all the complicated factors—including luck—that make up the differences in people’s financial circumstances.
No doubt, my father earned his money. My parents worked hard, made sacrifices, and built their retirement through decades of discipline. Legally, they don’t owe my uncle anything, including shelf space in the fridge. But they profess to be Christians, and that’s where my mind boggles.
MAGA is a “me me me” worldview with a flag wrapped around it. It’s the politics of “I earned mine, you should have earned yours.” It’s the belief that success is always deserved (for the good) and suffering is always justice (for the bad). It can’t comprehend that someone might be poor or disabled through bad luck and social barriers. Lack of resources comes from moral failure—from inherent unworthiness.
And anyone who suggests we should share what we have—that there’s no harm to letting your brother store vegetables in the fridge—that America belongs to all of us, no matter our backgrounds or gender or abilities, and that we have a responsibility to each other as humans, is naïve, entitled, or worse: It’s the wicked stealing what the righteous have earned.
The Ant and the Grasshopper
In Aesop’s fable The Ant and the Grasshopper, the ants work hard all summer storing food for winter while the grasshopper plays his music. When winter comes, the grasshopper has no food or shelter. We’re taught this story as children to learn the value of hard work and planning.
But here’s what MAGA forgets: the ants don’t let the grasshopper starve. They let him into their home. They feed him. And he entertains them through the long winter with his music. They survive together—the ants with their stored food, the grasshopper with his songs. The moral was never, “let the grasshopper die because he made bad choices.” The moral was, “different people contribute different things, and we need each other to survive.”
MAGA has rewritten the ending. In their version, the grasshopper deserves to freeze to death. He should have been an ant. His suffering is justice. And the ants sit inside their warm hill, congratulating themselves on their virtue, listening to silence instead of music.
Everything in my father’s house is his—he earned it. And everyone knows it. We don’t question it. We adapt. We eat pickles. We sneak milkshakes. We hide our salads.
In the end, we leave.
I suppose MAGA thinks they will be happier when everyone else leaves. In reality, their lives will be lonely and silent.
Now in his seventies, he still focuses almost solely on weightlifting, but injuries and illnesses have slowed him down somewhat.
He eats at least $40 worth of meat and eggs every day. Boomers have all the wealth.
He wouldn’t.
My father believes vegetables are toxic, so they have to be snuck into foods.
I’m not exaggerating any of this.
I have since realized that’s an eating disorder and contributes to my chronic illness.
After my aunt died, their shared house had to be sold to cover her medical bills.
In fairness, this reorganization was better for food storage, because refrigerators actually have different cooling and air flow zones.
I agree with my uncle, and I became a pescatarian five years later. I also oppose eating meat because I feel horrified by the butchering of other sentient life. But at the time, I set aside such misgivings because, as a diabetic, I thought keto would improve me. I actually do significantly better eating plants and carbohydrates.
Once, when no one else was around to see me, I ate some of my uncle’s oatmeal.
To be clear, my mother expressly intended the dog food to keep the meat and veg separated, and my father’s space inviolate and contained.
Coincidentally, it was my uncle—who used to work in politics—who told me about Gary Johnson in late 2011, and launched me down that path.
This was broadcast on C-SPAN and is still available on YouTube, although I beseech you not to waste time watching it.
I have a lot more to say about why MAGA is a cultural schism rupturing American society and why this happened, but will save that for another post.
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I really get this piece ...I was going to say I liked or loved it and I do but at the same time it is much more then that...it 'landed' it is so on the mark. I appreciate how you skillfully weave the themes together as the story progresses. And it makes clear what side of the fridge is what.