This subreddit can figure out everything about you by looking in your fridge

By Patrick Hearn Published February 15, 2021

When it comes to Reddit, the joke is “there’s a subreddit for everything.” Take the most obscure topic you can imagine and you will probably find a group of enthusiasts buried in some far-off corner of the website. Even with this knowledge, Reddit still manages to surprise people with just how strange it can be. A new subreddit called Fridge Detective is built around a simple but fun idea: guess who someone is based on the contents of their fridge.

After the user u/WeHaveAllBeenThere posted in Find a Reddit in search of a group like Fridge Detectives, it took only a few hours before the subreddit had been founded. It has since attracted the attention of more than 14,200 users. They’ve managed to figure out that the founder of Fridge Detectives, u/WeHaveAllBeenThere, is a gamer because of the number of jumbled ice cream cartons in his freezer.

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Another user by the name of u/madamematroshka posted a picture of a sparsely stocked fridge, and users of Fridge Detective were able to deduce she was a 23-year-old European woman living on her own for the first time.

The sleuths of Fridge Detectives look for regional foods to help pin a location on fridge owners. A bottle of local beer might be available outside the region it’s brewed, but it’s far more likely to be in the fridge of someone from that area. A region-specific product like Vegemite is usually a dead giveaway. Users also look for other, more easily missed traits — a bag of dog treats indicates pet ownership, while protein powder hints at a fitness regime.

The amount of food and prevalence of takeout containers also says a lot about a person. Someone with only a small amount of food is probably single, while a haphazardly stocked fridge points to a hectic lifestyle.

While the users on Fridge Detective are not always accurate, they are able to figure out a lot about a person from just a few details. Your fridge might not seem like that much of an indicator of who you are, but it provides an intimate snapshot into your day-to-day life. Curious to find out what your fridge says? Just take a photo and upload it to the subreddit over at r/FridgeDetective.

Mobile Writer

Patrick Hearn writes about smart home technology like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, smart light bulbs, and more. If it's a…

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