We live in the Pacific Northwest where there are usually 7+ rainy months. Summers are “supposed” to be Mediterranean, but the past 2 years have been cold and wet. We lost entire crops of tomatoes and potatoes to blight in a wet summer, and can barely get greens & broccoli growing before they bolt in a hot summer. The same issues apply to rasing food for our livestock. So we’ve learned to be flexible, try everything, then stick with what works and streamline the process.

When it comes to food-keeping we root cellar in the garage (keeps potatoes perfect until April), store squash, garlic & onions in the pantry, pressure can certain veggies, meat, soups & chicken stock, water-bath can fruit products and tomatoes, dehydrate (electrically) lots of fruit & veggies, sun or air dry herbs, and freeze meats & bulk produce until we have time to process it further. One of my favorites is chard that I haev lightly blanched then frozen. I eat it all winter.

We live in an area with hurricane-force winstorms and hte power goes out for days. After a neighbor loaned us a generator our first year, we bought a small quiet sturdy one of our own. Not only will it keep our 2 steers frozen, but the generator itself has proven to be useful for powering the female-scaled power tools in areas too far for an extension cord.

Anyway….a freezer can be a vital component of food storage, but it shouldn’t be your only one.

-Joanna

I’m not sure if we’ll plug it in (though I’m off to google how to use a chest freezer as a fridge) but the young woman who gave us the freezer said that farmers in our area use non-working chest freezers for airtight grain storage. Just thought I’d toss that possibility out for anyone considering turning their freezer off…

A friend of mine has an upright freezer full of rabbit and deer hides waiting to be processed. It’s quite the sight – green beans on the top shelf, and furry piles on the rest of the shelves!

The freezer is not a perfect solution. I lost last year’s green beans to a power outage and I still have a few chickens stuck to the bottom of the freezer in an inch of frozen raspberry puree, but it still cuts way down on shopping.

I live in the middle of a city. I can’t smoke fish and meat in my scrap of a backyard. I actually know a Salish Indian guy who tried, noop, his neighbors called the fire department. Every time.

I have been places where the meat preservation issue is solved by letting the chickens wander around in the street until needed, even in urban areas. Not happening here, at least no time soon. Some places where I’ve lived, I could go down to an open air market and buy a freshly killed chicken once a week. Chicken man would blowtorch off the pin feathers and then the chicken had to go right in the pot because it wouldn’t keep even in the fridge. I had a tiny refrigerator, horridly expensive electricity, and a freezer compartment large enough for a single carton of ice cream. It was fine, but then life was set up that way.

There is some danger of outrunning the available social engineering in all this. My mother used to go down the street to buy a live chicken from a neighbor in the middle of St. Louis in the forties. We may get there again, but for now the best way for me to get happy local chickens is to buy a bunch and freeze them. It’s far better tasting and cheaper than buying one organic chicken at a time at the store, and besides, the store bought chicken is going to come frozen anyway.

The freezer is the answer, until such time as it isn’t. And I’m with squrrl above, I’d cut back other places before I’d give up the freezer.

Shira in Bellingham, WA

We freeze some veggies and I am getting better at learning to can (though we’ve had some *interesting* tasting pickles before), I’m comfortable dehydrating or root celaring most of the veggies we don’t eat fresh.

I am bothered by the amount of energy it take to run the freezer. We were just offered a second chest freezer for free, but it is an older model, and I can’t see the need for it (and it’s energy consumption) unless Hubby decides to harvest a buffalo this year and we need to store the whole thing before selling shares to our yuppie friends.

The nice thing about where we live is that the most likely time for a power outtage here would be winter during a blizzard… so the freezer would have no trouble staying frozen. And our neighbor does have a generator that would be able to keep both our households fed (between his energy and our food, that is).

I see all your points in this post. But I just don’t know how my family would manage without our freezer.