Sans Fridge
Sharon June 17th, 2010
Let me start by saying that I don’t live entirely without refrigeration - I have and I can, but I don’t do it at present. I find life better with a little bit of coolth. Five months of the year, coolth is available free outside - and all of us in northern climates could pretty easily take advantage of it. The other months we do more complex things, but we still have just a little bit of coolth - just not the 15 cubic feet of it that is the American average.
That said, however, I don’t have standard refrigerator, and the reason for that is pretty simple - when we started the Riot for Austerity, we found that we simply couldn’t live on 1/10th of the average American’s electric consumption and still have a frig. Refrigeration, and anything that generates heat with electricity (dryers, electric stoves, electric heat) are the biggest energy hogs in an average American household. Getting your usage down means first getting rid of the wholly optional stuff (everyone’s hair and clothes will dry eventually with air, for example, at least to my mind) and then moving on to the things you think are essential, and seeing whether they really are.
Not everyone would make the choices that I do, and that’s part of the point - one of the points of the Riot for Austerity and other strategies for making radical reductions in energy is that everyone gets the same basic allotment of resources, and can use them however they want. Other families might make different choices and that’s completely reasonable - the point was to get to 90% down - there is no ideological choice about how to get there. If you consider your hairdryer a necessity, great - keep using it, just lose something else. The point is that we all use the same fair share - but we also all need freedom of choice within our limits.
For me, the critical issue is that we have a chest freezer. When we first started to farm, we attempted to do so without one - we got our first large freezer in 2005. What we found, however, was that given that we sell meat from the farm, having a freezer was a necessity. Twice in a row we scheduled butchering dates and slaughtered chickens and turkeys for our customers, and twice in a row, we found that people simply didn’t show up to pick up their birds. They were used to the supermarket model, where things can be held indefinitely. After two unpleasant occasions when we had to frantically call around to every person we knew, begging for space in freezers, and one in which we actually lost some poultry to rot, I decided we’d never do that again. It simply isn’t fair to the animals we slaughter to waste their lives - we bought a superefficient chest freezer.
But while this was one of the lowest electricity consumers for its size that was out there, it still used enough wattage that we knew either the frig or the freezer had to go, and it was no contest for us. The freezer was a basic livelihood thing. The frig we could do without - moreover the freezer meant that we could have a little bit of refrigeration - simply by taking frozen bottles of water and ice packs and rotating them into a cooler. We unplugged the frig.
Eventually we found that one side of Eric’s grandmother’s small side-by-side frig (long since unplugged) actually worked a bit better for us than the cooler, and reinvented the ice box. Once a day during the warm weather we rotate a few ice packs and a couple of old soda bottles filled with water into our freezer. The freezer is kept in the garage, which is partly insulated - it stays coolish in the summer and is very cold in the winter, and we’ve found the freezer uses less electricity there than in the house. Given that the freezer operates more efficiently when full, and that this time of year it isn’t (we haven’t yet added all the preserved food), the energy used in moving and refreezing this water is comparatively small, much less than a refrigerator would use.
From November to April, we have all the cool we could want - we put the food out on the side porch, which is insulated enough not to freeze, but not so much that it keeps the food warm. In fact, the walk-in porch fridge is actually a really lovely thing - nothing gets lost, much less food gets wasted, and you can see everything. On a rare warm day in those months, we might transfer the food to the frig, which is the only real hassle.
This would be considerably easier, actually, if we lived in a city or large suburb, and could shop more often. The reality of much of Europe, for example, was that the cold beer was down at the pub and one went shopping daily or regularly for ingredients for meals. That’s not viable out here in the country, so I think being frigless is actually considerably more challenging for rural folks than urban and suburban dwellers. It is, however, easier in a cooler climate, obviously.
We are a family of six plus a housemate, and we have only a small amount of refrigeration space, which encourages us to keep the quantity of refrigerables fairly small - and helps us usefully distinguish things that must be refrigerated and those that are commonly refrigerated but don’t need it. I find that setting external limits for myself means that I do the right thing automatically - Greenpa has a great post on this subject that I agree with wholeheartedly, even though my limits are different than his: http://littlebloginthebigwoods.blogspot.com/2007/07/power-of-limits.html
Here are some things that most Americans refrigerate that don’t actually need it:
- Eggs - these keep on a shelf for 1-2 months without refrigeration. In most of Europe, you won’t find eggs in a refrigerator case.
- Hard cheeses - in a cool spot, these will keep a long time - some people prefer the taste and texture this way.
- Most salty or vinegary condiments - ketchup, mustard, relish, many chutneys, fish sauce, soy sauce, hot sauce. Obviously check to see what the manufacturers recommendation is if you are purchasing them, but these are things that will not spoil at room temperature.
- Butter - use a butter keeper.
Many fresh vegetables can be kept moist, and that works as well as keeping them cool (basil and some tropical leafies should never be put in a frig). So basically that leaves the frig for milk and dairy products other than butter and hard cheese, meats and meat-containing things, leftovers and the most delicate greens. Eating more vegetarian meals alone reduces the need for a frig.
The majority of people in the world have no refrigeration, and they can eat safely. Meat is eaten within a day of butchering, shopping is done often or people use their gardens. Underground spaces, creeks, springs and other cool spots are used for some measure of natural refrigeration. It is perfectly viable to live without one, and we could do without the freezer and frig - we would sell less meat and keep our animals on the hoof, butchering only when necessary as is done in much of the world. Our present situation is a luxury and part of the realities of our work, but I don’t mistake it for anything other than that.
There are lots of ways to reduce your dependency on refrigeration - which besides the majority of electricity in the US comes from coal fired plants, also involves chemical coolants with dangers and when frigs outgrow their usefulness, create enormous problems in landfills. One solution is to give it up entirely, and that’s completely achievable. But most of us were raised accustomed to refrigeration and lots of it, so we need some transitional strategies to help us get off that dependency.
The first step is to ask whether your current frig is energy efficient - there are huge differences between older and newer models, and while I don’t like the abandonment of large appliances into landfills, there is a case to be made for choosing something more efficient. And as long as you are doing that, you could go to a smaller frig - Aaron Newton, for example, uses a dorm-sized frig for his family of four. Most of us don’t need nearly as much fridge space as we have.
Perhaps you could share with a neighbor, particularly if you live in close proximity - put the frig in the garage between your two houses. Perhaps you could accept that cold beer lives down at the bar at the end of the street and that you will mostly eat meat in the cool weather. Or maybe you can’t - but you won’t know until you experiment a little.
Another possible step is considering a chest-freezer conversion - some brilliant person discovered that you can put a temperature regulator on a chest freezer and create a frig that uses a tiny amount of energy. Frankly, the reason I haven’t done this is that I simply don’t care enough - we’re happy as we are. But if you cared a lot about a frig, this might be a good way to go: http://www.reuk.co.uk/Use-a-Chest-Freezer-as-a-Fridge.htm
Greenpa has been doing this a lot longer than I have, and has a long list of strategies for how to get along that way. All I can say is that I’ve never had food poisoning from this (although from eating in crappy restaurants that’s different), I waste less food than I used to, and despite the fact that my husband and I use computers for our job and live in a place with no gas lines, I use only 9% of the electricity that the average American household uses.
http://littlebloginthebigwoods.blogspot.com/2007/06/urbanfoxfireunplugging-fridge.html
Is this the one true way, the truth and the light? Nope, it is just how we do it. At the same time, I think the need to reduce consumption radically is fundamental - it has to happen and it has to happen across the board, no excuses. Losing the frig is one possible strategy.
Sharon
