Teach Yourself to Eat More Vegetables By Reorganizing Your Fridge

Hold up, now — can eating more vegetables really be as easy as changing where we store them in the fridge? One of Cooking Light’s tips for getting more fruits and veggies into our daily diet is to place them at eye level instead of hiding them in the crisper drawer. I am intrigued — and a bit skeptical.

Placing fruits and vegetables on the middle shelves of the refrigerator puts them in plain sight, and Cooking Light’s theory is that this makes it more likely that you’ll grab them instead of, say, the leftover pizza that used to occupy that space.

→ Put Produce at Eye Level from Cooking Light

Whether or not this space swap actually increases the likelihood that we’ll eat more veggies, I think this is a very practical way to at least remember which vegetables we have. I don’t know about your crisper drawer, but mine is a deep morass. I skim vegetables from the top when it’s time to make dinner, and often forget about the romaine at the bottom of the drawer until things start to get…swampy. If the veggies and fruits are right there on a middle shelf, I can at least see which ones are starting to get wrinkly so I remember to use those first.

On the “con” side, storing veggies on shelves presents some logistical concerns. I’m not totally convinced that crisper drawers actually work, but at the very least, they are handy for wrangling big bunches of leafy greens and roly-poly apples into neatly contained spaces. Picking up some simple open-topped plastic containers might help with middle-shelf organization, though then the question becomes what gets swapped into the crisper drawers. Maybe a whole drawer full of condiments?!

What do you think? Has anyone actually tried this?