WHAT'S IN YOUR FRIDGE DOES NOT NEED TO BE THERE

Can you live in a city, without a refrigerator? Some green pioneers think so, and have been blogging their progress, reports Robert Butler, in an extract from his article in the current issue of Intelligent Life magazine ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, September 2007

It was Greenpa who raised the issue of the refrigerator. Greenpa is a 58-year-old father of three. He started Little Blog in the Big Woods on March 24th 2007 after reading an article in the New York Times two days earlier about Colin Beavan, a guy trying to live with his family on Fifth Avenue without making any net impact on the environment.

Six days into his blog, Greenpa announced: “If you live in a city—you do not need a refrigerator...A great deal of what's in your fridge absolutely does NOT need to be there.” He listed the items and their shelf lives: butter lasts two weeks, eggs one week, tomatoes four days, peanut butter months. He explained how to seal meat so it keeps for three or four days.

His post was read in Toronto by Vanessa Farquharson, a woman who was trying to reduce her energy consumption by taking one new action each day. Thirty days in, she had decided that forgoing cold yogurt, ice cream and chilled white wine was not going to be one of them. “I made that spirally motion with my index finger next to my ear”, she wrote later, “because that's just crazy talk.” But Vanessa did inspect her fridge and noticed that inside there were two dials. On April 19th, 50 days in, a picture of her empty freezer appeared on her blog, Green as a Thistle. The freezer part had been switched off.

Over in Seattle, a blonde mother of two, who blogs as Crunchy Chicken, wrote to Vanessa: “We're not quite ready to make that step yet, but I'm rooting for you!” From his hideaway in the woods, Greenpa wrote to Vanessa too. “Brava!” Now he recommended that Vanessa start removing “the stuff in the fridge that really doesn't have to be there”.

Another 28 days on, Vanessa's blog had a photo of the empty interior of her fridge: “OK, listen up Little Blog in the Big Woods: I did it. I unplugged my fridge. Not just the freezer, the entire fridge. NO FRIDGE. Do I get green-freak status yet or what?” Six hours later, Greenpa wrote in with suggestions about carrots, kale and evaporative coolers. Over in San Diego, LaVonne Ellis, who had joined the 90% reduction challenge, linked on her blog to Greenpa, Colin Beavan and Vanessa with the words: “Wow. I've just experienced a mindshift.”

When it came to Green Freak status, the competition was hotting up. Four days before Vanessa had unplugged her fridge, Colin Beavan had gone and thrown the circuit breaker on his Fifth Avenue apartment, plunging his wife and two-year-old child into a world without an electric light, fridge, TV, kettle or vacuum cleaner. This is on the same street as Tiffany, Cartier and Saks! Colin had to write fast when posting the news on his blog as his computer was now powered by solar energy. The main problem, he said, other than brushing his teeth in the dark, was that he had been keeping his daughter Isabella's milk in a “pot fridge” and it wasn't cold enough.

“Mazel Tov,” wrote Sharon Astyk, a few hours later, from her farm near Knox in upstate New York. Sharon advised Colin to keep Isabella's milk in a bucket of cold water. OK, he might have to change the water occasionally, but, she assured him, “it will work”. As well as a farmer, Sharon Astyk is a 35-year-old mother of four and a lapsed PhD candidate in English Literature, who has blogged, forcefully and elegantly, at Casaubon's Book since 2004. Sharon has just completed her first month of “rioting for austerity”. On July 1st, she announced that “the big step will be the fridge turn off”. It certainly will be big: this is a family of six. After that, they are considering “going entirely without grid power”.

Not everyone approves of others pursuing the good life. Robert Louis Stevenson said Thoreau was a “skulker” and thought that “so many negative superiorities begin to smack a little of the prig”. Vanessa Farquharson's mother is not much keener. Four months into her year-long experiment, Vanessa writes: “My mother tells me that I smell, my hair looks crap and I'll never get a boyfriend."