The Anti-Fridge

What did people use Before?

Nicola Twilley

This article was generously donated by the author, you can find more of her fabulous writing on her award-winning blog listed below.







IMAGE: Owner of Defunct Amusement Park | Alpine, TX | 1-Person Household | Former WW II Prisoner of War | 2007. From You Are What You Eat by Mark Menjivar, “a series of portraits made by examining the interiors of refrigerators in homes across the United States.” Found via GOOD, where you can see many more photos from the series.

In America, 99.5% of households own at least one fridge. For many people who hear that statement, the surprising news is that 0.5% (1,520,299 households) don’t! What do those people do? Food processors, dishwashers, even ovens: most kitchen appliances seem totally optional. But living without a refrigerator seems slightly insane, if not completely impossible.

Of course, such dependence wasn’t always the case (nor is it still, in many parts of the world). In her excellent book, Fresh, Susanne Freidberg describes the inauspicious origins of the artificial cold chain, from ice plant infernos to frigoriphobie (the French refrigeration industry’s term for widespread public antipathy to cold storage).

During the first half of the twentieth century, however, the combination of technological advances, war (during World War One, Europeans relied on beef imported in refrigerated steamships to meet demand, while patriotic Americans were urged to conserve food and save leftovers using an icebox), urbanisation and suburbanisation, lifestyle changes, and sustained, pervasive marketing (“Kelvinated foods just fairly coax midsummer appetites!”) meant that by 1940, more than half of American households owned a refrigerator.






Midwife/Middle School Science Teacher | San Antonio, TX | 3-Person Household (including dog) | First week after deciding to eat locally grown vegetables | 2008.

IMAGE: Bar Tender | San Antonio, TX | 1-Person Household | Goes to sleep at 8AM and wakes up at 4PM daily | 2008. Both images from You Are What You Eat by Mark Menjivar, “a series of portraits made by examining the interiors of refrigerators in homes across the United States.” Found via GOOD.

Perhaps to an even greater extent than the car, the refrigerator didn’t just become ubiquitous – it became essential. Freidberg quotes a 1931 article from Golden Book Magazine, called “The New Ice Age,” which speculates on what the world would look like without it:

If the stupendous system of food preservation [...] which supports us were interfered with, even for a short time, our present daily existence would become unworkable. Cities with thousands of inhabitants would fade away. We would probably turn into beasts in our frantic struggles to reach the source of supply. It is not extravagant to say that our present form of civilization is dependent upon refrigeration.

The refrigerated cold chain played a huge role in reshaping the geography of food, removing the constraints of season, climate, and proximity in favour of monocultural economies of scale, astronomical food mileage, and permanent global summertime.

Freidberg’s book, however, concentrates on another, equally fascinating, impact of artificial refrigeration and food preservation: the ways in which they blurred “the known physics of freshness,” and undermined “traditional understandings of food quality related to time, season, and place,” creating a widespread mistrust, misrepresentation, and misunderstanding of “fresh” food that persists today.

IMAGE: Graphic Designer/Print Shop Owner | 2-Person Household | Founder of www.DeliverUsFromLiberals.com | 2008. From You Are What You Eat by Mark Menjivar, “a series of portraits made by examining the interiors of refrigerators in homes across the United States.” Found via GOOD, for the link, see below.

It is that lost knowledge about fresh food – what it should look like, how long it should last, how we should treat it – that designer Jihyun Ryou wanted to reintroduce in her thesis project at Design Academy Eindhoven, Save Food From The Refrigerator.

Ryou’s initial research brought her to the same starting point as Susanne Freidberg: artificial refrigeration has radically redefined our relationship with fresh food, and not necessarily for the better. Her solution is a set of ingenious, wall-mounted storage units that draw on traditional, pre-refrigeration food preservation techniques.

IMAGE: Verticality of Root Vegetables, Jihyun Ryou. Found via The Ecology of Food.

IMAGE: Humidity of Fruit Vegetables, Jihyun Ryou

Ryou’s designs rely on information that used to be common knowledge: for example, that root vegetables such as carrots and leeks last longer when buried upright in slightly damp sand, mimicking their growing conditions. Meanwhile, fruit vegetables (peppers, courgettes, and aubergines, for example) benefit from moist storage, rather than the cold and dry environment in the fridge.

IMAGE: Breathing of Egg, Jihyun Ryou

IMAGE: Symbiosis of Potato + Apple, Jihyun Ryou
Before refrigeration and permanently lit hen houses, eggs were a seasonal phenomenon: hens laid their eggs in spring, and they lasted for a few weeks in barns or pantries. Since most people buy and use eggs within that window, and since eggs stored in the refrigerator easily absorb the odour of neighbouring items, Ryou proposes a separate egg shelf complete with freshness tester (a fresh egg sinks in water). Meanwhile, her apple and potato storage unit takes advantage of the ethylene gas emitted by apples in order to control sprouting in potatoes.

Leaving aside the potential food preservation benefits and possible energy savings, perhaps the most important aspect of Ryou’s food shelves is their visibility. By putting fresh fruit and vegetables on the wall, Ryou’s design would force us to actually look at our food. The result of this daily confrontation, she hopes, is that we would eat more healthily, waste less, and – intangibly but importantly – rebuild our relationship with these equally biological and perishable, if slightly less animate, fellow organisms:

In the current food preservation situation [...], we hand over the responsibility of taking care of food to the technology. We don’t observe the food any more and don’t understand how to treat it. My design looks at re-introducing and re-evaluating traditional oral knowledge of food. Furthermore, it aims to bring back the connection between us as human beings and food ingredients as other living beings.

I believe that once people are given a tool that triggers their minds and requires a mental effort to use it, new traditions and new rituals can be introduced in our culture.

Ryou doesn’t call for the complete elimination of the refrigerator, but her idea of redesigning domestic space to suit food (as opposed to redesigning food to suit our appliances) is pretty exciting. Unfortunately, her elegant designs are not commercially available, although they don’t look impossible to recreate with quite a basic set of carpentry skills.

References:

Nicola Twilley's Blog:
http://www.ediblegeography.com/the-anti-fridge/

Fresh: A Perishable History by Sussanne Freidberg
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674032918?ie=UTF8&tag=ediblgeogr-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0674032918

Jihyun Ryou's work:
http://www.savefoodfromthefridge.blogspot.com/

Photos:
Good: You are What you Eat:
http://www.good.is/post/picture-show-you-are-what-you-eat/?GT1=48001

The Ecology of Food:
http://ecologyoffood.blogspot.com/2010/02/thinking-outside-fridge.html

Secret of the Zeer Pot: Ditching a Fridge in Australia

This article was published for Living without a Fridge and Beyond with the permission of Kim from Adelaide, Australia

You can make your own refrigerator for free, from stuff that you find in the rubbish, and it doesn’t need any electricity to run, just water. And it really works! Here’s how:

All you need is two clay pots, some sand, and a way to plug the hole in the bottom of the pot.

Get two terracotta pots, one needs to fit inside the other with about 1cm gap between. They could be the same size with one slightly raised. They need to be unglazed, unsealed terracotta, as the cooling happens by evaporation through the porous clay. Pots can sometimes be found in hard rubbish, or by asking around. If you’re really keen you could get hold of some clay and make them yourself. Or if you’re not, try secondhand from a garage sale, flea market, salvage yard or tip shop. They’re about $10 each from hardware stores. Imported from Italy.

Next step: plug the holes in the bottom of the pots, so that water doesn’t drain out. I did this with the lid of a PET bottle and sealed the edges with waterproof silicon sealant, but I’m sure there are other ways that are equally effective. I tried to go low-tech and use clay, but it got soggy and fell apart.

Line the inside of the larger pot with sand, and place the smaller one inside.

Placing the pot in a tray is a good idea, as on hot days the cool water condenses on the outside of the pot and runs down the side. This water is great to cool yourself in hot weather.

Top up the water in the sand layer every day so it stays damp, and cover the top with a towel. Even when it’s over 40 degrees outside, the inside of the zeer pot is 15 degrees, so food keeps a lot longer than it would without refrigeration.

One catch: the evaporation process needs a dry climate to work effectively. It wouldn’t do so well in a humid place.

Some more refrigeration tips:

Lots of things that are often kept in a refrigerator really don’t need to be. Sauces, jams, miso, eggs and fruit keep perfectly well out of a refrigerator.

Many vegetables keep better in a dish of water. This way they continue to be alive so are much more nutritious. Celery, broccoli, leafy greens and beetroot keep really well this way. Tomatoes, cucumber, zucchini are generally fine out of the refrigerator.

Of course all these things are much tastier and higher in nutrients if they are eaten directly from the plant. I read somewhere that leafy greens lose 90% of their nutritional value within hours of being picked. A great reason to eat weeds and grow your own food!

Rocket Stoves and More:

Another technology that I use at home that is made from free recycled materials is a zeer pot. This is a non-electrical refrigerator that works by evaporation. It is made from two terracotta pots, one that fits inside the other, and a layer of wet sand between. The sand is kept wet and as the water evaporates through the porous terracotta, the inside of the pot is maintained at 15°C. Fruit and vegetables can be kept for 20 days, compared to just two without. And meat and dairy can be kept for up to two weeks. Even on 45° days the temperature is maintained. Placing a wet towel over the pot helps to keep the contents cool. A dry climate is needed for the evaporation process to work effectively, so this technology would not be effective in humid places.

For cooking I use a rocket stove, which is made out of used food tins and scraps of ceiling insulation. This is fuelled by scraps of paper and small twigs, and due to the insulation is very fuel efficient. Another technology made completely for free from readily available waste materials. For more information on rocket stoves see www.aprovecho.org

I grow fruit and vegetables at home, keep chickens for eggs and for recycling food waste into fertilizer, make compost and liquid fertilizer, and save seeds. I glean fruit from urban fruit trees, and gather wild food and edible weeds as I walk around the neighborhood. I get a lot of food from supermarket dumpsters, the large supermarket chains throw out huge amounts of perfectly good food. I share excess food with friends and neighbors, which builds community and introduces people to new foods. By planting fruit trees in public places in my neighborhood, I am making it possible for more people to access food this way in the near future.

Rex Weyler: The Cost of Complexity

We’re all in Deepwater Now...

This article was kindly shared by Rex Weyler, author and founding member of Greenpeace. A link to Rex's blog is at the bottom of this article, as well as a link to his Deep Green Column for Greenpeace International.

The myth
Corporations don’t need regulation because protecting the environment is in their interest. The free market will protect nature. That theory disintegrated at 21:49, April 20, 2010, under a waxing quarter moon, on a dark spring night in the Gulf of Mexico.

We’ve witnessed the collapse of corporate credibility before at Bhopal in 1984, at Chernobyl in 1986, at the Marcopper Copper Mine in the Philippines in 1996, in Seveso Italy, at Love Canal, and in Minimata Japan for four murderous decades, as Chisso Corporation poisoned a fishing village with mercury.

These disasters cannot be written off as human error. They are the natural consequence of our society’s practice of treating nature as a free resource for profiteering.

Global corporations have demonstrated no ability to regulate themselves. Morality is too expensive.

It is cheaper to cut corners on a hundred oil wells and pay the fines on the one that blows out. It is cheaper to dump mercury, cyanide, or dioxins into rivers and bays, and wait to see if the poor inhabitants have the muscle to make the company pay. It’s cheaper to obliterate nature, finance your own “citizen group” to sign off on your treachery, and pay squadrons of lawyers to avoid liability.

Human industry now sinks its claws into every corner of the Earth, exploiting the last pockets of resources. The juggernaut took the easy stuff first because it was cheap. Now we go higher into the mountains for lithium and copper, deeper into the forest for ancient trees, and deeper into the earth’s crust for oil and gas.

Damn the cost. Rich consumers will pay, and the pelicans have no lawyers.

The Deepwater blowout that now stacks up among the greatest ecological holocausts of all time was not just an accident. It stands as the latest symptom of industrial civilization’s hubris.


Solutions aren’t the answer

Any robust species will naturally expand, if it can, to occupy its habit. However, in nature “success” has a cost. A flourishing species must find new energy and nutrient resources, and must negotiate with its environment to process its wastes. Ecologist and historian Kenneth Boulding called this the “metabolic cost” of evolutionary success.

Likewise, as human societies dominated their habitats, they sought solutions to the problems of paying this metabolic cost. Societies often fail to see that those problems were the results of previous solutions. Irrigation allowed ancient city states to solve the problems of population growth and scarce rainfall, but extensive irrigation produced salty, depleted soils.

To win new lands for food production, empires abandoned their cities and moved to new watersheds. Eventually, they clashed with other migrating communities, so they designed weapons and built armies to “solve” conflict. The subsequent arms race created new problems. They solved this with bigger armies, but big armies need more food. New problem.

Innovative technologies helped solve these problems but technologies, like armies, must be fed resources. Ships consumed forests. Machines demanded iron and oil. Computers require copper, plastic, silica, and lithium.

Where does it all stop?

Anthropologist Joseph Tainter studied societies to find out where the problem-solution-problem cycle stops. Most complex civilizations and empires simply collapsed under the weight of their metabolic costs. Their solutions became bigger problems until they consumed all available resources, depleted their habitat, and collapsed. Persia, Rome, Maya, and Easter Islanders traveled this route to failure.

In The Collapse of Complex Societies, Tainter describes how civilizations trapped themselves in increasing complexity until they experienced diminishing returns on their solution investments. At that point, new complex solutions no longer paid for themselves. To feed the bigger army meant expanding the empire, but a bigger empire has more borders to defend and more over-taxed, irate citizens to pacify.

To finance the rising cost of growth, an empire must discover new energy subsidies. Ancient Rome increased its energy consumption by annexing distant forests, taxing landed peasants, and capturing slaves. However, the hunt for more energy costs energy. “Imperialism,” Boulding explained, “makes the empire poor.”

Finally, a growing civilization experiences negative returns on its investments. The modern disasters in Bhopal or the Gulf of Mexico provide examples of negative returns. As our industrial system seeks out more energy, we find ourselves digging up the Canadian tundra, destroying wild watersheds, draining lakes, and boring deeper into the Earth’s crust below the ocean.

We may notice that the greatest driver of environmental destruction is the growth process itself.

Tainter points out that the only known examples of avoiding collapse – in both nature and in human history – involve simplifying, not growing. Eventually, we have to stop building false “solutions” that create new problems and negotiate a lasting peace with nature.

The high cost of high tech

We may believe that a new technology will solve the problems of growth, until we account for the full ecological cost of that the new technology. To build hybrid cars and computers, we seek out copper, lithium, zinc, aluminium, and rare earth metals, displace communities, and push deeper into Earth’s remaining wilderness.

Timothy Gutowski and colleagues calculated that as computer chips shrunk in size and grew in power the material and energy intensity per unit mass increased a million-times. This is even before we factor in the cost of armies swarming over Afghanistan to secure the lithium for batteries.

We tend to think that since our computers require so little energy to operate, that they are “efficient,” but we’re measuring the wrong thing. We need to measure the “embodied” energy and material required to mine and ship resources and to build telecom infrastructure, server networks, software, research labs, and office towers. According to the International Energy Association report, “Gadgets and gigawatts,” electricity consumption for computers, cell phones, iPhones, and other devices will triple by 2030, and this does not include the bulldozers digging up resources.

Remember when people claimed computers were going to save paper? This never happened. In 1950, at the dawn of the computer age, humanity used about 50 million tons of paper each year. We now use 250 million tons, five times the paper. Growth swamps efficiency. Computers stimulated growth and created more uses for packaging and paper. Meanwhile, during that period, the earth lost over 600 million hectares of forest.

In “The Monster Footprint of Digital Technology” Kris De Decker points out that utility stations operate at about 35 percent efficiency, so the actual energy consumed is almost three-times the electricity consumed when a device is switched on. This is the metabolic cost of growth, the rising cost of complexity, paid long before you boot your computer or recharge your iPhone.

Where does this energy come from? It comes from damming rivers, loping off mountain tops for coal, and boring wells deep into the Earth’s crust below the ocean.

In Deepwater now

Like our ancestors, modern human enterprise took the low hanging fruit and harvested the cheapest oil first. In the oil heyday, fifty years ago, oil flowed from shallow wells with 99% net energy efficiency.

Today, we dig into oil sands, destroy vast tundra and grassland, melt bitumen in giant furnaces, fill lakes with black sludge, kill migrating waterbirds, displace caribou and human communities, trigger lung disease, mix bitumen with condensate refined thousands of kilometres away, ship the goop through long pipelines, endanger our coasts with oil tankers, and heat the planet like a flambé to deliver crude oil at 50% net energy efficiency.

More costs, less benefit, represents the “declining return” on our investments. Eventually those returns turn negative. In the Gulf of Mexico, British Petroleum lobbied politicians to cancel regulations, drilled a 6000 meter well in 1500 meters of water, and cut corners to save money.

At 21:49 on April 20, 2010, gas from an improperly sealed well reached the BP drilling rig, ignited, blew up the rig, killed 11 people, devastated the Gulf’s coastal economy, and launched an ecological holocaust on the scale of Bhopal, Chernobyl, and Minimata. The blowout has killed thousands of seabirds, turtles, fish, and marine animals. Some 50,000 to 150,000 barrels of oil per day pours into the Gulf of Mexico. On top of this, BP has added over 1-million gallons of toxic Corexit dispersant, banned in the UK, which contains the neurotoxin 2-Butoxyethanol, arsenic, cadmium, cyanide, and mercury.

The Gulf of Mexico tragedy is not unique. It is only the latest symptom of a civilization out of control, stumbling blindly to pay the metabolic cost of reckless, unsustainable growth.

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

Readers can make comments at Rex Weyler’s Ecolog
www.http://rexweyler.com/blog-placeholder/

Rex's Deep Green Column can be found at Greenpeace International
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/about/deep-green/

Links in this essay:

Joseph Tainter
http://www.cnr.usu.edu/htm/facstaff/memberID=837

The Collapse of Complex Societies http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=052138673X

Timothy Gutowski, et. al., “Thermodynamic Analysis of Resources Used in Manufacturing Processes,” Massechusetts Institute of Technology.
http://web.mit.edu/2.810/www/lecture09/10-Gutowski.pdf

International Energy Association, “Gadgets and Gigawatts”
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2009/05/power-hungry-gadgets-endanger-energy-efficiency-gains.ars

Kris De Decker, “The monster footprint of digital technology,”
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/49730

Hydroelectric Dam in the Amazon: Genocide, Ecocide - not Efficiency

Photo and this quote by Thomas Doo Marmo.

The chief Raoni cries when he learns that Brazilian president Dilma released the beginning of construction of the hydroelectric plant of Belo Monte, even after tens of thousands of letters and emails addressed to her and which were ignored as the more than 600 000 signatures. That is, the death sentence of the peoples of Great Bend of the Xingu river is enacted. Belo Monte will inundate at least 400,000 hectares of forest, an area bigger than the Panama Canal, thus expelling 40,000 indigenous and local populations and destroying habitat valuable for many species - all to produce electricity at a high social, economic and environmental cost, which could easily be generated with greater investments in energy efficiency. We do not need to destroy our world, and our fellow people on this earth to live richly.

Facts about the Brazilian Rainforest:

1.) We are losing it.
2.) The Amazon is the worlds last remaining rain forest, containing more life than any place else on earth.
3.) Deforestation and Climate Change are threatening the Amazon.
3.a) A threat to the Amazon is a threat to our survival. See these Amazon facts. More than 20% of Earth's oxygen is produced in this area, thus the name "Lungs of the Planet".
3.b) The people who protect the Amazon by living there sustainably and speaking to keep it untouched, are faced with complete destruction of their way of life. There may also be fifty or so Amazon tribes living in the depths of the Amazon rainforest that have never had contact with the outside world. They are the ones who know how to live sustainably on this earth.
4.) Hydroelectric dams, which produce massive amounts of greenhouse gases, and destroy wild rivers, absolutely destroy the lives of Indigenous peoples, and all other living creatures in the area seriously threaten the Rainforest.
5.) There are other ways of getting needed hydro, such as efficiency that don't require destroying our oxygen source.

What you can do:

1.) Get everyone you know to sign this petition.

2.) Continue to post and share articles, educating people you know.

3.) Help make friends and family realize what happens to people and our world when we do not live with a conservation model towards energy.

4.) Send the below press release to any blogs, papers, newspapers in your area.

5.) Support movements that give all of us more democractic control of our world.

6.) If you can, Donate to directly support Indigenous Leaders organize against the dam.

7.) Live simply. See Indigenous Peoples who know how to live sustainably on this earth as leaders. Support their struggles.

PRESS RELEASE, PLEASE SHARE FAR AND WIDE, SEND TO YOUR LOCAL NEWSPAPERS
Brazil Green Lights Controversial Amazon Dam, Steamrolling Environmental Laws and Human Rights: IBAMA authorizes installation of Belo Monte Dam Complex despite escalating local, national and international opposition

For more information, contact:
Christian Poirier, Amazon Watch, + 1 510 666 7565, christian@amazonwatch.org
Caroline Bennett, Amazon Watch, + 1 415 487 9600, caroline@amazonwatch.org
Brent Millikan, International Rivers, +55 61 8153 7009, brent@internationalrivers.org

Brasília, Brazil – The Brazilian government has issued the full installation license allowing the Belo Monte Dam Complex to break ground on the Amazon's Xingu River despite egregious disregard for human rights and environmental legislation, the unwavering protests of civil society, condemnations by its Federal Public Prosecutor's Office (MPF) and the request for precautionary measures by the OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). The license was granted by Brazil's environmental agency IBAMA despite overwhelming evidence that the dam-building consortium Norte Energia (NESA) has failed to comply with dozens of social and environmental conditions required for an installation license.

The risky $17 billion Belo Monte Dam Complex will divert nearly the entire flow of the Xingu River along a 62-mile stretch. Its reservoirs will flood more than 120,000 acres of rainforest and local settlements, displace more than 40,000 people and generate vast quantities of methane – a greenhouse gas at least 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

The installation license will allow for NESA to open access roads, initiate forest clearing at dam construction sites encompassing some 2,118 acres, and begin construction on the complex immediately. It also instigates publically subsidized funding from Brazil's National Development Bank (BNDES) to finance 80 percent of the project's spiraling costs. The bank has come under increasing scrutiny from the Public Prosecutor's office and civil society due to alarming evidence that approval is based on political grounds, often downplaying problems of economic viability and compliance with social and environmental safeguards.

"This is a tragic day for the Amazon," said Atossa Soltani, Executive Director at Amazon Watch. "By turning a blind eye toward the tragic consequences of this dam, President Dilma Rouseff is undermining the positive environmental and social advances Brazil has made in recent years and miring its image on the global stage just as it prepares to host the UN Rio+20 Earth Summit next year."

The decision follows years of recently escalating intense local opposition and a string of government resignations in rejection of the parameters of the project, including IBAMA's president Abelardo Bayma, who allegedly resigned over the Belo Monte dam project license amidst intense political pressures from the Ministry of Mines and Energy and President Dilma Rousseff.

"The installation license for the Belo Monte Dam is in clear violation of the recent request by the IACHR to stop any construction until precautionary measures are met. Now the Brazilian government is in clear violation of human rights, especially those of indigenous peoples affected by the project. By moving forward with this project, Brazil has denounced the authority of the IACHR and has completely rejected international human rights treaties," said Astrid Puentes, Co-Director of the Inter-American Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA), one of the legal groups who filed the petition to the IACHR representing Xingu communities.

Fierce opposition by local inhabitants to Belo Monte has not wavered. "Belo Monte's installation license is a sign of the government's deepening authoritarianism, as it continues to steamroll over environmental legislation and human rights," said Antônia Melo, a spokeswoman for the Xingu Alive Forever Movement (MXVPS). "The government seeks to build this dam at any cost in order to benefit corporate interests at our expense. We will not cede an inch. This license is the entryway to a crime that we will prevent from being committed at any cost."