Oprah reveals why she keeps a whole octopus in her fridge

‘Let me just tell you, when you open that refrigerator and there’s that octopus just sitting there... It’s a gross out thing,’ Winfrey says

Oprah Winfrey is coming clean about an unusual item she keeps in her fridge.

The 70-year-old talk show host has been the target of quite a few rumours over the years, one of which involved the contents of her kitchen. On 15 March, Winfrey joined Jimmy Kimmel on his eponymous late-night show and confirmed the validity of past speculation about her lifestyle.

To Kimmel’s question whether it was true she kept an entire octopus in her refrigerator, Winfrey said: “Yes.” The actress explained how her partner of more than three decades, Stedman Graham, loves octopus so much that he “eats it for breakfast almost every day”.

Winfrey asked Kimmel whether he thought it was a strange cuisine to want to indulge in so early in the day. “Let me just tell you, when you open that refrigerator and there’s that octopus just sitting there... It’s a gross out thing. It’s got all the tentacles and the head... it’s real,” she added.

“Every morning when he’s eating it, I say: ‘I believe you’re the only person who’s having this for breakfast right now,’” Winfrey continued.

However, Graham doesn’t eat the octopus alone. The adventurous eater pairs the protein with okra, a flowering plant that has a grassy flavour.

Kimmel was quick to poke fun at Winfrey’s partner’s obvious affection for things that start with “O.”

“He loves things that start with O” — like Oprah,” Kimmel quipped.

Winfrey and Graham have been together for more than 30 years, meeting in 1986. Six years later, the pair got engaged but quickly called it off.

“I realised I didn’t actually want a marriage. I wanted to be asked,” Winfrey confessed in her 2020 personal essay for O Magazine. “I wanted to know he felt I was worthy of being his missus, but I didn’t want the sacrifices, the compromises, the day-in-day-out commitment required to make a marriage work.”

“My life with the show was my priority, and we both knew it,” she continued.

Winfrey told Vogue in 2017 that she and Graham rarely spoke about marriage. When they discussed it, they both concluded that tying the knot would eventually lead to separation.

“The only time I brought it up was when I said to Stedman: ‘What would have happened if we had actually gotten married?’ And the answer is: ‘We wouldn’t be together,’” she explained. “We would not have stayed together, because marriage requires a different way of being in this world.”