there's no turning back now: the day I unplugged my fridge

Well here it is for whoever is out there. The day I decided to unplug my fridge, ponder it a while then write a blog about it. Let me tell you a little bit here. I'm newly 26, live by myself, work at an organic bakery and cafe where everybody seems to be saving the world by drinking organic Santa Cruz root beer and eating vegan brownies. (More on that later)....and I live for thinking outside of every box.

So I live by myself in a meagre little house, very small by most standards. It could be described as slightly larger than your average treehouse, with running water and a futon to call my own. It is my ideal living situation for the time being, gives me plenty of head space to do the darndest things...like remove the power from what could be considered a staple of every North American kitchen, the refridgerator.

Maybe it's because I like to call myself a forward-thinking environmentalist, I lust over home-made peach preserves, drool over a tasty batch of saurkraut, and cohabitate with a few hundred red wigglers who turn my food scraps into something I'm planning to barter with at the farmer's market...whatever the reason, I can't seem to get enough do-gooding for the environment. I need more than organic spritzers and vegan brownies, that seems so '04 to me. Not just because it's "good for the environment", I think my efforts excite me because they force me to think outside my own comforts, and live dangerously!

Let's talk logistics then, you may qualify for fridge-freedom if you exist in your own urban space in the same way I do:
a: you live by yourself, or have very eccentric and adventurous roommates
b: you work at a restaurant or cafe where you eat a lot of your meals
c: you have a strange affinity for getting yourself off the grid (then back on to it through a blog)
d: you have a pile of snow outside your door keeping everything under it bone-cold without the use of any electricity or smog-creating devices
e: you once called yourself a "vegan" and still purchase very little meat or dairy

Once you can establish one or more of these charateristics, let us begin by describing the contents of my fridge. If you consider yourself any kind of planet warrior, concious eater or vegetarian, you must admit you have peeked into other people's food vessels and taken a moment to silently judge their moral worth, an act I shall not begrudge you of at this moment.
My compact energy star 4000 contains the following items, trucked in from all over the world but purchased idealistically at the local health food store:
1. an over-priced jar of almond butter
2.flax seed oil, a lingering habit from my days without animal fat
3. leftover rice, chili and lentil soup from the cafe
4. miso paste
5. organic butter, a present to myself when I graduated from veganhood
6. a half (soon to be quarter) of an expired berry pie from the bakery
7. a large bage of beets and carrots I've been working on all winter
8.a jar of olives, a bottle of lemon juice
9. greens plus powder
10. half a dozen free-range eggs (which I've heard are stored outside the fridge in Europe anyway, is this true?)

As you can see, my fridge has been blasting away, sucking up power all winter to keep these measly items cold. I need it no more!
So I took everything out, performed a deep clean with some hot water, Dr. Bronners soap and white vinegar. I removed the vegetable crisper drawer and filled it with some snow, put it back in a higher position in the fridge and buried said items in this white stuff. I've left the door open a crack to avoid that broken-down fridge stink which tends to develop, and pulled the plug. It was immediately more quiet in my little house, as the fridge created a constant hum which had previously gone unnoticed.

As for the frozen items, I'm a soupy girl so I had to figure out a way to keep the 5 tubs of carrot-squash soup I made last month frozen. Easy! I just plopped them in a plastic tub and stuck them outside my door, where the temperature is -5 degrees and falling. Same goes for the berries I still have leftover from the summer, which I bought in bulk and froze for use in my daily smooties.

So there it is! I must admit I borrowed this idea from the recent issue of Briarpatch magazine, and I'm a little bit nervous about how it's going to work. It might not be for everybody, but it's worth a shot in the middle of winter.
I guess this urge to make a change sprung out of my own personal disdain for the growing use of biodegradeable plastic bags in shopping centres. You can't just replace one bad habit with another, all the corn that grew to make those bags was most likely drenched in chemicals and pesticides, and probably did a number on the bio-diversity of the soil where it was grown. I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure if everyone would just make the small little change and put their groceries in a bag that already exists, and commit to using it everytime they shopped, we wouldn't need to create more plastic out of anything. This is a small little change that is forcing my to think outside my own little box, and think outside my fridge too.
I'm not going to save the world, but I'm going to change my own. I'll keep you all posted on the progress, at least that's the plan.