Preparing to Unplug your Fridge

"Heaven isn't so far away as people say. I've got a home, high in my heart. Heaven is right where I come from, I never throw it away. I know the place, and I'm going home." Buffy Saint Marie

Unplugging your fridge is a fantastically easy thing to do. You can just unplug, or make things a little easier with some preparation. Here's a simple list to get you started so that your kitchen is well stocked when you power down. Basically, you are looking at having all of the same foods around that you usually do, but perhaps more in larger quantities than in the past. Having lots of dry goods handy, as well as dried fruits, and longest lasting vegetables means that there are only a few items you need to get more regularly. You'll have these on a week when you don't feel like shopping as your comfort food. Just a note also that canning and drying can be a handy addition to this list.

Veggies: Squashes, Tomatoes, Zucchinis, Peppers, Carrots, Potatoes, Sweet Potatoes are all great things to have handy in larger quantities. Smaller, more delicate veggies like lettuce, herbs, and greens need special care. Please see my articles on this.

Protein sources: Big organic bag of lentils, other dried beans, nuts, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds. Remember you can also soak the nuts to make nut milks. Lentils are fast cooking, high in iron, and tasty which is why I favor them.

Perishables: Seek out sources of great local dairy or meat products and prepare to pick those up on the day.

Dry goods:

All tastes vary but here is what I keep on hand so that I can always prepare some food!

Grains: Rice, barley, oats, flour.

Pasta: Various pastas and also a jar or two of pasta sauce.

Fruit: Dried fruit, and also as much local fruit as you can handle! Apples will last a long time. Berries need to be eat much closer to the time that you purchase or pick them. Canning fruit - rhubarb, blueberries, apples, is a great way to stay stocked up year round. See notes on canning.

Eggs: A half carton is nice to have around, or a full carton if you like eating eggs a couple of times a week. Buy eggs fresh, keep them in a cool spot, and use in a couple of weeks.

Treats: Chocolate, popcorn, a bag of organic local potato chips. Having ingredients around the house for tasty popcorn or cookie variations is always a plus. I must add here that the more fresh food you get your hands on, the less tasty a lot of junk food will begin to seem.

Oil: Whatever organic, local oils you use, organic butter if you use this kept in a cool place. Remember to be aware of what oils degrade if you heat them. I have heard that olive oil does not degrade if you keep it at the temperature of boiling water, 100 degrees. So, cooking with olive oil and water together is a good option.

You can also see this handy list of things you'd think you need a fridge for, but don't.

Indoor Garden: A nice addition is to also grow your own indoor garlic chives ( I have written about this), as well as your own herbs. That way, even if all you have in the house is pasta and some oil, you can add your fresh herbs and eat better than almost anyone!

Neighbors: Suss out some neighbours who you think would enjoy some of your leftovers. You will likely overestimate from time to time, and can either preserve your food in cool snow or water, or simply share with your closest neighbour. It's an instant way to build community, you won't just be creating dishes when you cook anymore.

"I got my kitchen stocked, I got my door locked, there ain't no demons here, and I don't really care whose name is printed in bigger type, I live in a world full of hope, not a world full of hype. I ain't no saint, I help myself to what I'm in, but I help other people too. I'm sleeping soundly." Ani Difranco, Puddle Dive

Iran, Jackson, Global Warming: Press Fails Us

Here's a letter I sent to newspaper editors recently. It's about how we are not getting the information we need to heal the planet and our world.

After countless days of Michael Jackson news in the headlines, I wonder: Are Canadian newspapers failing the people? Or are we are fortunate enough that all of the world issues that seemed more important to report recently have disappeared?

Is the death or life of Michael Jackson - or any celebrity -- more important than,
say, acidic oceans, collapsing fisheries, energy decline, a 20% increase in the military budget, or an urgent global warming crisis? Whatever happened to Iran? Did the crisis there suddenly stop because Michael Jackson died?

Newspapers may believe they accurately report on our ecological and social challenges, but most Canadians remain completely unaware of the severe catastrophes that may befall them, their children, and grandchildren. Coverage of celebrities in the face of these urgent issues is a strange use of the public’s precious time to become informed. It leads one to believe that there are no serious issues to cover. Or, do editors and writers of Canada’s major papers secretly wish that they were working for People Magazine?

Should Canadians one day awaken to find themselves surrounded by an
unstoppable global warming collapse, they will feel betrayed by the
media. Global warming has been known by the scientific community for more than a century. James Lovelock had the CO2 data in hand in the 1960s. Yet we continue to pretend to "debate all sides" of this issue, deny facts, and cover our grief and fear in trivial news like Michael Jackson’s auctioned gloves. We all remember the holocaust as something that has passed, but are we capable, as we often profess of preventing future ones?

Like doctors, is it not the job of journalists to alert the public of danger, help citizens act in their democracy based on clear facts? This job is not being done.

We need perspective and a sense of our social priorities. If we fail to
solve the challenges of global warming, energy decline, toxic wastes, and
dying oceans, our progeny could witness a global holocaust beyond anything
history has yet experienced. If we fail to confront dictatorships and war, we are bailing on the central role the news is supposed to play. If provided with the correct information most Canadians would prefer this to reliving ABC and Thriller, and feeling nostalgia for someone who was exploited by the press since childhood. Step back, and rethink the role you play.

Andrea Peloso: Grow Garlic Chives Indoors

One of the fun things about not having a fridge is the encouragement to create your own little bar of herbs and veggies right in your home. If you want to feel something easier than opening a fridge door and finding your fresh herbs or garlic from the store, try growing!

Growing your own garlic is easy. It's a great way to always have fresh garlic chives in the house without having to preserve them. Here's how you do it:

1.) Take a bulb of organic garlic and break it into individual cloves. 2.) Place them, pointy end up, in organic soil spaced about 6 inches apart. The tail should just slightly come out of the soil. 3.) Water consistently as the cloves sprout. Then, the garlic will require less water.

These will not grow conventional garlic - though they could with the right amount of time, temperature, and depth of your pot - but will sprout chives that taste as strong as garlic and can be cut whenever you need to sautee them or use them in recipes.

Overshoot and Tech Dreams by Rex Weyler

This article was republished on Living without a Fridge and Beyond with the permission of Rex Weyler

Rex Weyler
Deep Green, April, 2009
1640 words
==========================
Overshoot and Tech Dreams
Global warming is a symptom of human overshoot: the consumption and waste that exceeds the biophysical capacity of the Earth. If we attempt to reduce the fever, but ignore the disease, we will, at best, extend the suffering.

Most species, when confronted with abundant food and no predators, will outgrow their environment. Locusts or pine beetles will devour their hosts and crash. Bacteria in a petri dish will exhaust the food capacity and breed themselves to death. This is overshoot.

In 1944, the US military brought 29 reindeer to St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea as food for soldiers. However, the war ended, the Americans abandoned the island, and the reindeer remained. With no predators and lots of lichen, the herd grew to over a thousand reindeer in fifteen years. Biologists estimated that the island might have sustained this herd of a thousand reindeer, munching moderately within the Island’s carrying capacity. However, the herd grew to 6,000 reindeer by 1965, then, in one winter, with the lichen obliterated, the herd crashed back to 44 animals. This is overshoot.

Rex Weyler and fellow activists block bulldozers threatening the Amazon rainforest and people who live within it. Most of the forest has been destroyed, but due to this action, some has now been protected.

Humans at Earth Scale

The Rapanui on Easter Island, with a population of only a few hundred in 900 AD, had already degraded the island’s capacity by cutting down trees to transport giant stone statues. As the Rapanui population grew to over 7000 by 1350 AD, their forest disappeared, they splintered into sects, and fought over the remnants. When Europeans arrived in the eighteenth century – seeking resources to solve their own overshoot problems in Europe – only a few hundred Rapanui remained, scraping for survival on a depleted landscape.

Throughout human history, settlements and cities have overshot local environments in Pleistocene watersheds, Mesopotamian floodplains, or the American dust bowl. In these cases, communities could migrate, relocate, or shift food sources. Now, in the twenty-first century, the human enterprise has reached the scale of the planet. This time, we cannot abandon our watershed. We will not sail away to a new island or discover a new hemisphere. We’re flat out of hemispheres.

The new dream for sustaining human consumption is “innovation.” Our alleged leaders – political and corporate – denied global warming for decades. Then, they blamed it on sunspots or claimed it might be a good thing that would allow us to grow avocadoes in Norway and drill for oil in the arctic.

Now, we hear claims that industrialists take global warming seriously. Witness the tsunami of proposals to create a “green economy,” cool the planet with sulfate aerosols, fertilize the dying oceans with iron, build hybrid cars, and construct giant “green energy” systems.

Some so-called “green ” projects may indeed play a role in a human future, but not if we rush to treat the symptoms while ignoring the disease. A friend in Los Angeles told me: “You used to see Porsches everywhere. Now everyone has a Prius.” In Washington D.C., hip lobbyists drive $100,000 electric Tesla sports cars. Did trading in the Porsche for a Prius or Tesla help the planet? No. It cost the planet in metals, plastics, toxins, energy, and CO2, the burgeoning throughput of human overshoot.

“Customers who embrace green products,” says Sandy Di Felice of Toyota Canada, “don’t want a radical change to their lifestyle.” Therein lies the problem: The world’s most voracious consumers cling to a hope that technology will rescue them from having to change their lifestyles. Tech-fix entrepreneurs, their academic apologists, and political cheerleaders scramble to create new “green” products, but fail to address the cause of the fever: reckless human consumption of Earth’s natural bounty. We need to produce and consume less stuff, not more.

Rex Weyler above: aboard the Zodiac, the first ship to confront whaling with Greenpeace
The tech trance

The builder, who only has a hammer, treats everything as a nail. In the US, the earnest Obama administration has leapt to solve global warming with the tools they know: money and engineering. In a world addicted to a growing energy supply, they seek a cleaner, greener strain of the drug, while simultaneously and contradictorily launching “shovel ready” highway projects and applying Band-Aids over the inevitable consequences.

Obama science adviser, John Holdren proposed blasting sulfate particles into the atmosphere to block the rays of the sun. In fairness to Holdren, he acknowledged, “It would be preferable by far to solve this problem by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” However, in April, Holdren claimed, “global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth's air.”

In 1971, scientist Paul Crutzen first proposed the idea of cooling the atmosphere with sulfur particles, mimicking a volcanic eruption, to reflect solar energy and offset the effect of greenhouse gases. This plan treats the symptoms while ignoring the disease. Global warming is caused by burning hydrocarbons and depleting forests, not by the sun. The sun is not our enemy.

A program to launch sulfates into the atmosphere will burn more fossil fuel energy, the source of the problem, risk depleting the ozone layer, and would likely dry the Mediterranean and Mideast climates. Blocking the sun is going backwards to sustain the unsustainable.

Engineers at Columbia University are developing a “carbon scrubber” that could remove over 300 tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year. The challenge with this approach is that humanity is currently emitting over 20 billion tons of carbon annually, and increasing at 3% per year. Capturing even half of this carbon in scrubbers would require over $6 trillion in initial costs, plus operation, maintenance, and eventual replacement of the scrubbers. If the public pays this, it amounts to a bailout of the energy companies on the scale of the current banking bailouts, and would contribute to another global recession.

More significantly, as Herman Daly pointed out decades ago in Steady State Economics, these “geo-engineering” mitigations actually make us more vulnerable. Once we prop up our unsustainable habits with counter-technologies, we are trapped. We build up a dependence on the tech-fix, and when future generations can no longer maintain the fix, the impending crash will be worse.

Daly also pointed out that these are “costs” of running society, not “benefits,” and these two get confused in our GDP analysis of economic health. We must return to authentic quality of life rather that put hope in stimulating more unsustainable growth, more stuff, and more activity.

Reviving the oceans

Carbon emissions increase ocean acidity, devastating coral reefs and contributing to ocean species die-off. Adding powdered limestone to the oceans could theoretically reverse acidity. Fertilizing the oceans with iron could stimulate phytoplankton photosynthesis, absorbing more CO2.

These “solutions” could help, but they represent patchwork mitigations with added costs. Adding iron and limestone to the oceans mimics the natural process of wind carrying fine sand over the ocean, but there are problems. For phytoplankton to sequester the CO2, the organisms have to die and sink to the bottom. A study recently published in Nature magazine showed that the projects sequestered far less carbon than predicted.

Likewise, iron fertilization tests conducted by the Alfred Wegener Institute “dampened hopes on the potential of the Southern Ocean to sequester significant amounts of carbon dioxide and thus mitigate global warming.” The iron helped Phaeocystis phytoplankton increase slightly, less than natural blooms, but copepods quickly consumed the shell-free, soft algae. Then, the copepods became food for shrimp-like amphipods, which provided additional food for squid and whales. This was a positive result, but the experiment did not result in tons of CO2 safely sequestered on the ocean floor.

Grasping at tech straws
The American conservative think tank, Enterprise Institute, which once denied global warming, has now joined the bandwagon and proposed building “artificial trees,” giant towers that suck carbon dioxide from the air and store it. Like the carbon scrubber plan, this scheme requires more materials and fossil energy, the source of the problem.

Others propose fertilizing trees with nitrogen to stimulate CO2 absorption, but high nitrogen concentrations create nitrous oxide emissions (a greenhouse gas), groundwater contamination, and water demands, since trees that consume larger amounts of nitrogen also require more water.

An episode of Discovery Project Earth tested a scheme to drop tree seedlings from the air, encased in biodegradable containers, rather than plant trees traditionally by hand. The project failed. On Earth Day this year, Obama’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Van Jones, promoting the social benefits of environmental mitigation, said live on CNN, “trees don’t plant themselves.” Mr. Jones appears to be a nice person and well intentioned, but he exposes a fundamental misperception about natural systems ecology. News flash: Trees do plant themselves. They only require an intact forest. Dropping trees from airplanes and building giant “artificial trees” represents industrialism gone mad.
The presumed tech-fix solutions suffer from fundamental errors because their designers do not understand ecology. They attempt to preserve a wealthy life-style that is not sustainable. They fail to perform necessary net-energy and carbon-cost accounting. They demand an ever-growing supply of material and energy, and they fail to account for total ecosystem analysis.

Humanity is in overshoot. Every day, without much comment from our “news” media, we degrade the carrying capacity of the planet, add more humans, and extend ourselves farther out over the edge of the sustainability cliff, with nothing below to stop our fall.

Worse, the tech-fix proposals avoid genuine solutions: Humanity must consume less, not more. We should replace our petroleum-guzzling car cultures with light rail transport. We should be localizing agriculture, preserving farmland, conserving energy, recycling everything, creating resilient communities, and developing a steady state economic system. If we are serious about global warming and preserving natural wilderness, we should be stabilizing human population with non-evasive means such as women’s rights and contraception. We should be leaving remnant wilderness alone to recover through natural processes.

These genuine remedies require the wealthy nations and consumers to drastically change their lifestyles, not buy hybrid sports cars. These changes prove politically difficult, but they represent the inevitable path back to paradise.

===========================

Readers may comment here or at Rex Weyler’s Ecolog
[link to http://rexweyler.com/category/ecology/ ]

Andrea Peloso: Preserving Lettuce

I have some different instructions on the blog for greens in general, including herbs, kale, swiss chard and beyond. But here are some general ideas for keeping delicate lettuce without a fridge:

a.) Buy locally from farmers who have just harvested your lettuce, or grow lettuce fresh from the garden, I have had such greens last 2-4 days fresh in my home. This is an understatement as often this lettuce has come from the farmer and is already a few days old. You can keep them in a cotton bag that absorbs the moisture but keeps the air around them humid.

b) There are also organic green lettuces that you can buy with a little soil packet. I get these during times when I cannot grow my own lettuce. You are buying the whole plant. Take this home and either plant it indoors or keep the roots in a cup of water. These greens will do quite well. Remember, soil is precious, so once the plant is done, add the soil to a plant or in your garden!

c) In winter, you can also simply leave your greens right up against a cold window which is just like leaving them in a fridge if it is cool enough. Find a good spot between a curtain and the window.

d) Buy less lettuce and eat it sooner!

Andrea Peloso: The Unplugged Home - Easy when the Fridge is Off

artwork: "Sleeping House"

I realized once I had unplugged my fridge that I was able to leave my entire apartment without using one 'drop' of power when I did not need it. This felt incredibly liberating. I felt in control of what I was using, conscious of what was happening, like I had at least found a personal solution to waste. I would leave my house, and not one tiny red light was blinking for no reason.

Conventionally, the fridge is always running. I am tempted to add 'always already' running but let's save Heidegger for another time...

We anticipate the need to use power without knowing whether or not we will actually need it. Our unquestioned assumption is that we will always need power.

The fridge motivated me to turn off the rest of the simple gadgets living sleepless lives in my space. I had a battery operated watch which I would use to set a battery operated alarm, or just rise by the sun. My computer/tv/stereo could easily be unplugged by simply bending down once, simply getting up again.

In one small moment I had unconsciously converted my home from a home that perpetually used power to one that only used power when I needed it.

It's amazing how far our society has gone to prevent us from simply unplugging.

But its very easy. Its great to let the house sleep. We've created a culture with so many needless things running, tiny lights, nothing too quiet or still. We need rest, so does the earth.

I called Toronto Hydro. I am currently paying $3 a month in hydro, what I pay to Bullfrog Power, and a $17 connection fee. When I am away, they will suspend my power. I can save that money and also make the point that power is not always (already) necessary.

Andrea Peloso: Using a Compact Fridge

If you want to reduce your reliance on a refridgerator, but don't want to unplug completely as I have, consider a compact fridge. There are lots of models, and the new models use much less energy than a full size fridge. Also, when there is nothing in your compact fridge - just unplug it until you need it again!

This blog can help you use your compact fridge by learning what does and does not need to be refridgerated so that you won't need as much refridgerated space. Also, please see some of my articles on my friend Albert's solution of using a cold room in the winter (no fridge) and a compact fridge in the summer.