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When Tupperware filed for bankruptcy this week, it put me in mind of a friend who recently asked me to return their biscuit container. No drama there. Man is born free, and if you’ve exercised that freedom to become the sort of man who’d ask for a used tissue back, well that’s none of my business.
The issue was that they asked me without warning, as we stood in the kitchen post-dinner party saying our goodbyes. And so I was forced to open The Cupboard — you know the one — and shatter the thin veneer of sophistication I had spent the evening polishing. Was theirs the container that now bore a tomato stain in the shape of Australia? The one stacked at the bottom of a gravity-defying reverse pyramid? A protracted search confirmed my suspicion that it was in fact the one now home to the laundry pegs.
If I were to apportion blame for the embarrassment felt in that moment, I would lay it at the feet of Brownie Wise. In the late 1940s, in Florida, Wise started hosting home sale parties to shift Tupperware. She did it to combat technology resistance: viewed in a catalogue or in-store, people thought Earl Tupper’s newly patented containers would smell bad and be hard to seal.
But the parties, which became Tupperware’s most successful venture, sold more than pliable plastic: a vision of colour-coordinated cupboard harmony. “No unsightly half-used packages!” promised one ad, which showed a fridge in which even the milk was stored in matching pastel. Tupperware would satisfy “the woman’s demand for beauty” somewhere she’d not previously known she demanded it: her leftover lasagne.
In seeking bankruptcy protection, the company cited a “challenging macroeconomic environment” and consumers moving away from direct sales. One thing they could not cite was waning interest in beautifying hidden parts of the home.
“Smart” storage solutions are a booming sector, driven by influencers who demo ingenious solutions to household “problems” on their social channels: lazy Susans to organise condiments, mini peg rails to hang crisp packets on. On TikTok, there’s a whole sub-genre of “restock videos” in which people decant bathroom, cleaning or fridge products from the custom-designed packaging they were sold in into aesthetically harmonious containers.
Like their party-hosting foremothers, these influencers are icons of a particular sort of empowerment. They have found a way to build status (and in some cases small fortunes) within the domestic sphere. But the rest of us should protect our chaos cupboards at all costs. Storage is the backstage area of the home and it doesn’t need to look “nice” any more than a sock drawer does.
How could it, when the forces of progress conspire against any attempt at order? Every month brings with it new takeaway containers that it would be a shame to waste, every Christmas a stocking full of beeswax food wraps and silicon bowl lids, every pickling project a new Mason jar. The “tupperware” most people own comes from a hundred knock-off brands, and it is an everyday miracle of engineering that not a single one of them can fit another’s lid.
I got a lesson in how to embrace this anarchy with style last week, when I spent the day in Angela Hartnett’s kitchen. Hartnett, a brilliant, successful and somewhat chaotic chef, revealed that when the tyranny of mismatched leftovers threatens to overwhelm her she a hosts a “freezer party” and invites the neighbours to help her consume the mystery contents of every zip-lock bag and deli container that’s been playing Jenga in the cold store. There are no grand promises that she’ll do “better” next time — she simply waits for the chaos to build again to breaking point.
To put it in terms a Utah momfluencer would appreciate, it’s time to give up on ever finding that missing lid and #blessthismess instead.