Living without a refrigerator seems wrong on some level -- like having a hole in your living room where the television used to be. But one couple in Portland, Oregon, has been without a fridge for the past seven years in an effort to reduce their carbon emissions.
It's a difficult concept to grasp from my kitchen in Kansas City, where the day doesn't start until the milk and coffee concentrate is poured over ice cubes -- all of which come from my fridge. Although I'll admit that having an ice dispenser included with my fridge feels like luxury, I'm seeing refrigerated milk among my list of needs, not wants.
The Portland Tribune has a list of 30 tips from Jon and Willow Biemer on how you can get rid of your fridge. It swings between advocacy for fresh foods and an acknowledgment that such an experiment wouldn't be possible without canned foods.
And a lot of it's just advice for living healthier, such as eating smaller portions and more fresh food. But some of the suggestions seem to fly in the face of that axiom. Consider # 14: Leftovers make a gourmet breakfast. Most food keeps overnight. The folks over at the Barf Blog might beg to differ. And here we get to the reason refrigerators were invented in the first place: to avoid spoilage and food-borne bacteria.
We don't have to live in a world where the only way to preserve meat is
to salt it and grocery stores are "community refrigerators." Community
refrigerators couldn't exist if everyone decided to stop stocking their
Kenmores. Biemer notes that this is just a return to how things used to
be and still are for some people:
30. Remember, everyone lived without a refrigerator a hundred years ago, as do many people in other parts of the world now.
It's your decision with your kitchen, but you'll have to pry my fridge from my cold, milk bottle-holding hands. Living without one is just not a sustainable answer, even if it's in the interest of sustainability.
[Image via Flickr: Sarah_Ackerman]
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Jon Biemer replies -- Thank you for highlighting our decision to live without a refrigerator. This may not be sustainable for most, if only because it is rare that spouses agree to live that far outside society's norms. Consider however, how modest choices support more fundamentally sustainable choices. Like living in a smaller home. Like living without a car. Like having fewer children. Like choosing a career that helps others be sustainable. Turning off the water while brushing your teeth is only a beginning.
Umm...I hope this isn't a picture of the couples kitchen, I would think it would be easier and better for the humans to cut down carbon emissions by washing dishes by hand instead of using a dishwasher.
No kidding. This is just absurd.
It's extremists like this who sabotage any sort of carbon reduction movement because A) they make it seem like everyone needs to take drastic measures to make a difference, and B) no one wants to be lumped into a category with "those" people.
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